Is your smartphone a double agent? Following a warning from the U.S. government’s top security agencies on Chinese-made phones, at least one mainstream U.S. retailer has decided to stop selling them. Best Buy has dropped smartphones, smartwatches or laptops from Chinese manufacturer Huawei. Huawei is the world’s third-largest smartphone maker. Best Buy is the United States’ largest […]
The Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, signed into law by President Donald Trump in December, significantly changed federal estate tax planning statutes. Namely, the cuts double the current personal exemptions for estate tax beneficiaries. Previously, the cap for personal exemption from federal estate taxes was $5.5 million dollars. It is now $11.2 million dollars. Married couples […]
One of the biggest outperformers since the February 2016 bottom has been industrial stocks primarily due to a combination of globalized synchronized growth and a weaker dollar. Below is a chart of the Dow Jones Industrial Average showing its more than 50% gain. Simply put, these stocks have been one of the strongest groups in […]
First Cobalt Corporation, a Vancouver-based miner, will take over American mining company US Cobalt Incorporated. The all-stock deal is reportedly worth about $116 million dollars. The buyout also represented a 61.8% premium to the closing stock price of US Cobalt shares on March 13. “We’re trying to fast-track our way into North American mining and refining,” said […]
Last spring California passed Proposition 64, legalizing the sale of recreational marijuana for those over the age of 21. Pot was suddenly on an equal footing with beer and tequila in the Golden State. Marijuana had been legal already in nine states, including Oregon and Nevada on the California border, as well as nearby Washington […]
James Rickards is a lawyer turned hedge fund consultant turned political advisor. He’s also a gold fanatic and since 2011 a best selling author with the publication of Currency Wars: The Making of the Next Global Crisis. In 2016 he published The Road to Ruin: The Global Elites’ Secret Plan for the Next Financial Crisis, a book that […]
Life expectancies are on the rise. While that’s good news for those of us that have big plans for our later years, it may not be the most promising development for our financial plans. According to a 2011 survey, a substantial number of folks in both groups underestimated how long they might live by at […]
Sovereign wealth funds have boosted their investment in private equity and other alternative investments to nearly one-fourth of their total assets, according to a report by accounting firm PriceWaterhouseCoopers (PwC). PwC reported that yield-hungry sovereign wealth funds had 23 percent of their assets invested in private equity, real estate, infrastructure and commodities in 2016, up […]
Billionaire Texas oilman T. Boone Pickens, 89, has been involved in legendary companies such as Gulf Oil, Unocal and Phillips Petroleum. Oklahoma State University’s School of Geology and football stadium is named after him. He ran his own energy hedge fund, BP Capital Management, for 40 years. Now Pickens has an exchange-traded fund (ETF) bearing […]
Analysts are pointing toward real estate investment trusts (REITs) as a lucrative investment for the year ahead — thanks in large part to the Trump tax cuts. The new tax law that now classifies a REIT as a “pass through” investment. This means that if your income is in the top tax bracket, your REIT […]
