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Biden Signs a Bill to Revive Infrastructure… and Gold!

Biden Signs a Bill to Revive Infrastructure… and Gold! | FXMAG.COM
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Table of contents

  1. Implications for Gold

    Gold rallied thanks to the changed narrative on inflation, and Biden’s infrastructure plan can only add to the inflationary pressure. Huge price moves ahead?

    I have a short quiz for you! What the government should do to decrease inflation that reached the highest level in 30 years?

    A) Decrease its expenditure to make room for the Fed to hike the federal funds rate.

    B) Press the US central bank to tighten its monetary policy.

    C) Deregulate the markets and lower taxes to boost the supply side of the economy.

    D) Introduce a huge infrastructure plan that will multiply spending on energy, raw materials, and inputs in general.

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    Please guess which option the US government chose. Yes, the worst possible. Exam failed! At the beginning of November, Congress passed a bipartisan infrastructure bill. And President Biden signed it on Monday (November 15, 2021).

    To be clear, I’m not claiming that America doesn’t need any investment in infrastructure. Perhaps it needs it, and perhaps it’s a better idea than social spending on unemployment benefits that discourage work. I don’t want to argue about the adequacy of large government infrastructure projects, although government spending generally fails to stimulate genuine economic growth and governments rarely outperform the private sector in effectiveness.

    My point is that $1.2 trillion infrastructure spending is coming at the worst possible moment. The US economy is facing supply shortages and high inflation caused by surging demand, which choked the ports and factories. In short, too much money is chasing too few goods, and policymakers decided to add additional money into the already blocked supply chains! I have no words of admiration for the intellectual abilities of the members of Congress and the White House!

    Indeed, the spending plan does not have to be inflationary if financed purely by taxes and borrowing. However, the Fed will likely monetize at least part of the newly issued federal debt, and you know, to build or repair infrastructure, workers are needed, and steel, and concrete, and energy. The infrastructure spending, thus, will add pressure to the ongoing energy crisis and high producer price inflation, not to mention the shortage of workers.

    Implications for Gold

    What does the passing of the infrastructure bill imply for the gold market? Well, it should be supportive of the yellow metal. First, it will increase the fiscal deficits by additional billions of dollars (the Congressional Budget Office estimates that the bill will enlarge the deficits by $256 billion). Second, government spending will add to the inflationary pressure, which gold should also welcome.

    After all, gold recalled last week that it is a hedge against high and accelerating inflation. As the chart below shows, gold not only jumped above the key level of $1,800, but it even managed to cross $1,850 on renewed inflation worries. The infrastructure bill was probably discounted by the traders, so its impact on the precious metals market should be limited. However, generally, all news that could intensify inflationary fears should be supportive of the yellow metal.

    biden signs a bill to revive infrastructure and gold grafika numer 1

    You see, the narrative has changed. So far, the thinking was that higher inflation implies faster tapering and interest rates hikes and, thus, lower gold prices. This is why gold was waiting on the sidelines for the past several months despite high inflation. Investors also believed that inflation would be transitory. However, the recent CPI report forced the markets to embrace the fact that inflation could be more persistent.

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    What’s more, tapering of quantitative easing started, which erased some downward pressure on gold. Moreover, despite the slowdown in the pace of asset purchases, the Fed will maintain its accommodative stance and stay behind the curve. So, at the moment, the reasoning is that high inflation implies elevated fears, which is good for gold. I have always believed that gold’s more bullish reaction to accelerating inflation was a matter of time. It’s possible that this time has just come.

    Having said that, investors should remember that market narratives can change quickly. At some point, the Fed will probably step in and send some hawkish signals, which could calm investors and pull some of them out of the gold market. My second concern is that gold could have reacted not to accelerating inflation, but rather to the plunge in the real interest rates. As the chart below shows, the yields on 10-year TIPS have dropped to -1.17, a level very close to the August bottom.

    biden signs a bill to revive infrastructure and gold grafika numer 2

    When something reaches the bottom, it should rebound later. And if real interest rates start to rally, then gold could struggle again. However, I’ll stop complaining now and allow the bulls to celebrate the long-awaited breakout. It’s an interesting development compared to the last months, that’s for sure!

    If you enjoyed today’s free gold report, we invite you to check out our premium services. We provide much more detailed fundamental analyses of the gold market in our monthly Gold Market Overview reports and we provide daily Gold & Silver Trading Alerts with clear buy and sell signals. In order to enjoy our gold analyses in their full scope, we invite you to subscribe today. If you’re not ready to subscribe yet though and are not on our gold mailing list yet, we urge you to sign up. It’s free and if you don’t like it, you can easily unsubscribe. Sign up today!

    Arkadiusz Sieron, PhD
    Sunshine Profits: Effective Investment through Diligence & Care

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    Arkadiusz Sieron

    Arkadiusz Sieron

    Hi, my name is Arkadiusz Sieroń. Call me a liar, but I am writing about the precious metals thanks to Arthur Laffer, Alan Greenspan, John Keynes and Fredrich Hayek. Really! Would you like to know how these economists, some of whom have been dead for a long time, triggered my adventure with gold? When I was in high school, I took part in the Entrepreneurship Olympic, one of the biggest thematic competitions for pupils from secondary schools. During my preparations, I studied an academic textbook, in which I came across a Laffer curve. Eureka! If the tax revenues are the same at low and high tax rates, the government should lower them! I did not win the competition, but I achieved much more. I decided to become an economist! And I loved the idea of small government and economic freedom since that very moment. After graduating from high school, I moved to the capital. I was very excited, as I started to study economics at the best economics university in the country. However, the professors disappointed me very quickly. Why? They all were statists, supporting extensive government intervention and fiat currencies. Gold? It is a barbarous relic! Have you not read Lord Keynes? I was very depressed. I even considered giving up my studies in economics and enrolling in the Philosophy Faculty! You can see now that I was really desperate. When I was contemplating nothingness and vanity of vanities, a few of my classmates lent me a handful of fascinating books, such as Capitalism and Freedom by Milton Friedman. I also discovered the publications of the Austrian economists who supported the idea of the gold standard. It sounded crazy in the 21th century, but it was inspiring. I rediscovered the sense of studying economics. I continued my studies and one day I read these words: “Gold and economic freedom are inseparable”. Try guess who wrote them. Don’t give up, try once again. Don’t know? Alan Greenspan. Shocking, right? This is a quote from his “Gold and Economic Freedom”, an article published in 1966. Several years before he became the Fed Chair, and several more before the real estate bubble, that he helped to pump, up burst. Quite ironic, don’t you think? Both his essay and the Great Recession (and the accompanying bull market) motivated me to study investment portfolio management and the precious metals. I became a certified Investment Adviser very soon and I started to work for the biggest pension fund in the country. My corporate career seemed to be very promising. However, I quickly discovered that the company invested most of the participants’ funds into Treasuries or shares of the big state companies. And they didn’t even want to hear about investing in precious metals. I quit. I found a shelter at the university, as a Ph.D. candidate and – after a defense of my thesis about certain negative consequences of inflation (i.e. the Cantillon effect) – as an Assistant Professor. I was finally free to study economics, freedom, and gold. The more I read about gold, the more I was terrified. Most of the so-called experts who write about the precious metals, don’t have any idea about the subject they discuss. They treat gold as a mere commodity. Or they claim that gold is either worthless as it does not bring any yield or that its price should always rise. I was really let down by the state of understanding of the gold market among the analysts and investors. But I could not do too much. Until the sun shined down on me. I got a job offer at Sunshine Profits. I didn’t hesitate a second and accepted it, although many professors discouraged me: “You are a scholar, focus on science and do not write silly newsletters about bullion" -they advised me. But I did not listen to them, as they clearly didn’t understand the nature of gold. It is not a barbarous relic, it is the longest used money in history, and a clinking witness of human civilization. Gold is the asset, which used to serve as the safe- haven and portfolio diversifier for investors from the entire world for years. I wanted to study its properties and to share with my knowledge with people who do not have time for that. I wanted to help investors to better understand fundamentals of the gold market and improve their investment decisions. I’m happy that I can do that at Sunshine Profits. I’m really proud to be a member of our team and provide investors with high quality investment analyses about the gold market.


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