Your News to Know rounds up the most important stories about precious metals and the overall economy. This week, we’ll cover:
Gold’s roughly $300 surge – and why blaming one jobs report misses part of the story
Why BRICS gold buying still doesn’t add up to a gold standard
The better question behind Washington’s battle with the Fed: Whom should the central bank actually serve?
Gold gained $300 – but not because of one jobs reportGold has suddenly become a media darling again after gaining roughly $300 in a matter of days.
Reuters reported Friday that gold climbed over 7% for the week, reaching a seven-week high over $4,300 an ounce.
Why? Well, the obvious explanation was the July jobs report.
The Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) reported that U.S. payrolls declined by 23,000 jobs, a massive miss compared to the +80,000 median forecast.
Yes, that’s significant – but the report gets more interesting the deeper you look.
The BLS also revised May and June payroll growth downward by 103,000 jobs combined. Labor-force participation has fallen 0.7% since January. With these revisions, the average monthly payroll gain over the last 12 months was just 34,000.
In other words, Friday’s report didn’t suddenly reveal a problem. Instead, it added another piece of evidence to a slowdown that has been developing for some time.
I wrote about some of those early warning signs earlier this year.
So yes – the jobs report mattered to gold. Weak employment data changed expectations about what the Federal Reserve might do next. (That matters because interest-rate expectations affect the dollar’s strength, inflation forecasts, the economy and the relative appeal of physical gold compared to other assets.)
But here’s the part I think gets lost in the headlines:
Gold’s rally had already begun before Friday’s jobs report arrived!
Gold was trading around $4,030 on Monday. By Thursday, before the official payroll report, the price of gold had already climbed over $4,200. Economic concerns, changing expectations for Fed policy and developments around the Strait of Hormuz were all being repriced.
Then the jobs report added fuel.
That distinction matters because financial headlines have a bad habit of treating gold like a vending machine: Insert one disappointing economic report. Receive higher gold price.
If I’ve taught you nothing else over the years, I hope I’ve taught you this: The real world is a lot more complicated than that.
One weak jobs report doesn’t tell us the economy is headed for recession. Neither does one week’s $300 move tell us where gold goes next.
What concerns me is that the evidence of a slowdown is really piling up… Consider:
Hiring has slowed
Previous job gains are being revised downward
Labor-force participation has weakened
Inflation remains troublesome (Update: As of Wednesday August 12th, CPI reads 3.4%)
The Fed is trying to balance all of these pressures simultaneously
That’s a much bigger story than, “Jobs report sends gold higher.”
And there’s another lesson here.
A decade ago, $300 was close to the price of a 1/4 oz. gold American eagle. Today, you can’t even buy a 1/10 oz. gold eagle (the smallest made by the U.S. Mint) for $300! Today, gold’s price can move that much in a few trading days.
That’s not to say anyone should chase a rally. I can’t tell you whether gold’s next $300 move will be up or down.
Here’s what I think is important: This level of volatility means the old assumption that you can simply wait for the “perfect” moment to pull the trigger on diversifying your savings with gold may be a waste of time.
Diversification isn’t about predicting next week’s price. It’s deciding how much of your savings you want exposed to the debt-based financial system. The same forces that have driven gold’s price up 2.3x over the last decade.
Yes, BRICS keeps buying gold – but that still doesn’t mean a new gold standard is comingAn interesting article on the Mises Institute made the rounds over the weekend. Its headline is unusually direct: Why a BRICS Gold Standard Is a Fiction.
I admit I have to agree with its basic conclusion.
For years, every BRICS summit, central-bank gold purchase and discussion of alternative payment systems has inspired another round of speculation that a gold-backed BRICS currency is right around the corner. I was one of the many who so clearly saw the writing on the wall…
News flash: So far, it hasn’t happened.
Now, BRICS have made significant progress on their parallel global financial system (as my colleague Philip Patrick and I described from the BRICS conference in Rio de Janeiro last summer). Most recently, with major changes to the Shanghai Gold Exchange, what some more strident analysts were calling China’s Gold Reset.
But there’s an important distinction I need to make here. Deciding to buy gold is not the same thing as adopting a gold standard.
China demonstrated that distinction rather nicely just last week.
Reuters tells us that the People’s Bank of China added nearly 20 metric tons of gold to its reserves in July – its largest monthly addition since October 2023. China’s officially reported holdings rose to just over 76 million troy ounces.
That’s real news!
China is still adding to its central bank gold reserves. Other central banks have been doing the same thing. I recently addressed the broader trend of world central banks rethinking safe havens after they set a new second-quarter gold buying record this year.
We know why central banks own gold – as an inflation hedge, as a universally-accepted store of value, as a hedge against sanctions/dollar weaponization and so on. Gold bullion is essentially an emergency fund, at a national level.
But none of those benefits of gold require a gold-backed currency.
The thing is, in order to enjoy the “benefits” of an unbacked currency (things like running a budget deficit and suppressing interest rates), a central bank cannot have a truly gold-backed currency. That was my big mistake. To me, the benefits of a gold standard more than outweigh the drawbacks. I still believe that the first nation to launch a viable, fully-convertible gold-backed currency will have a massive advantage over the rest of the world.
But I was thinking like a citizen. To a central banker, control is way more important than purchasing power. The first nation to adopt the gold standard today would have to give up many modern conveniences, including deficit spending and currency manipulation. Can you imagine any central banker in the world simply giving up the power to print currency?
I miscalculated.
Having said all that, I think the Mises article goes too far. I don’t think we need to claim BRICS countries secretly want hyperinflation, or speculate about enormous secret Chinese gold reserves, to explain why a formal gold standard is unlikely.
The simpler explanation is enough.
A real gold standard restricts monetary flexibility and therefore government power. Promising to redeem a currency for a fixed amount of gold means an end to deficit spending.
How many modern governments – East or West – are eager to do that?
I can’t think of any.
So all the gold-standard speculation can distract us from the much more interesting development happening under our noses.
Central banks don’t need to turn their currencies into gold certificates for gold to become more important.
They simply have to keep stockpiling gold – and that’s already happening.
The great monetary shift of this decade may not arrive with a dramatic press release announcing that “The gold standard is back.”
It may look more like central banks gradually deciding they don’t trust currencies. That they want a larger share of their reserves in an asset that nobody else can print, freeze or sanction.
The Fed should be independent – but not unaccountablePresident Trump’s renewed effort to remove Federal Reserve Governor Lisa Cook has revived another argument that never seems to go away:
How independent should the Federal Reserve really be?
Reuters reports the White House has given Cook three weeks to respond to mortgage-fraud allegations that her attorney calls “baseless.” The allegations remain unproven, and the Supreme Court blocked an earlier attempt to remove her, ruling that she had not received the procedural protections required by law. (Frankly, that decision was a cop-out.)
This is a truly unusual case. No president since the Fed’s founding in 1913 has attempted to remove a sitting Fed governor. So this truly is a test of both executive branch power and Fed independence.
I’m not going to pretend I know how Cook’s case should be resolved – that’s what courts are for.
But the controversy raises a larger question worth asking: Who does the Federal Reserve serve?
The answer is not supposed to be President Trump. (It wasn’t supposed to be Presidents Biden, Obama, Bush or Clinton either, for the record.)
And it certainly isn’t supposed to be the Federal Reserve itself.
The Fed describes its status as “independent within the government.” Governors are appointed by the president and confirmed by the Senate, but serve staggered 14-year terms specifically designed to insulate monetary policy from short-term political pressure. Yet the Fed reports to Congress, publishes its financial statements and meeting minutes and operates under goals established by Congress.
Granted, there’s a sensible reason for that structure.
Imagine a central bank whose governor knew he could be fired whenever an elected president wanted cheaper money before an election. (This is exactly what happened to Arthur Burns under President Nixon, and we know how that ended up.)
Central bankers should be free from political pressure to make tough decisions. They should be independent.
But “independent” should never be confused with “beyond criticism,” or even with “always right.”
The Fed has made consequential mistakes.
Just in the last few years, the Fed kept monetary policy extraordinarily loose after the pandemic. It badly underestimated the inflation that followed. Americans then lived through the fastest rise in consumer prices in over 40 years.
That’s not a record to be proud of!
At the same time, we can’t blame every economic failure on the Fed.
Congress writes spending laws. Presidents sign them. Fiscal deficits and the national debt are not created by seven Federal Reserve governors at their conference table.
Our monetary problems are institutional.
That’s why I think the most useful question isn’t whether any President should “control” the Fed or whether the Fed should be “independent” of Trump.
It’s whether an institution with this much influence over the purchasing power of our money has the right incentives, the right accountability and a playbook capable of surviving the pressures Washington keeps putting on it.
I’ve made a similar argument before: the people change, but the underlying forces don’t. We can argue all we want about Fed independence, but with our national debt on the brink of $40 trillion, how much does it matter?
The debt makes the rules.
That’s what matters for everyday American families.
Presidents change. Fed governors change. Economic theories fall in and out of fashion.
Your retirement date doesn’t care who’s in the White House or who’s chairing the next FOMC meeting.
=============================================================
Skipping Meals Because of Food Costs?
=====================================================================================
Top economist warns that the AI math doesn’t make sense: ‘Profits are currently being funded by investors rather than earned from customers’
Torsten Slok of Apollo Capital Management broke the AI stack into four layers: models/applications, cloud/compute, energy/grid, silicon/equipment.
Silicon and equipment (chipmakers) show 41% profit margins.
Models and applications (OpenAI, Anthropic and similar) show -59% operating margins.
Upstream profits are real but they are paid for by capital raised by the losing layer, not by end-user cash flow.
Goldman projects AI investment past $1 trillion this year.
Hyperscalers have already issued record debt to keep the spending going.
Oracle is running deep negative free cash flow and huge lease commitments tied to its OpenAI deal.
Slok’s bottom line: the high-margin part only works if the low-margin part keeps raising money or growing revenue.
https://fortune.com/2026/08/10/torsten-slok-ai-profit-margins-capex-oracle/
===================================================================
British Busybodies Flood Police With Calls To Report Neighbors' BBQs After Stupid Government Alert
Fire crews beg: stop the snitching as emergency system faces 'crying wolf' backlash...
========================================================================
How To Activate Your Body to Eat Its Own Diseases, High Intensity Exercise. And Olive Oil. Dr Horse takes
Terra Delyssa Organic Olive Oil from Walmart and lost 47 pounds. I sent away for Organic Potato Starch. It arrives
Monday. It is an anti-resistant starch that melts visceral fat. Do not cook it.
==============================================================================
Ukrainian officials flee Kramatorsk in panic, taking documents with them TASS
For many years, Kramatorsk served as the "capital" of the Donetsk region for the Kiev regime — it was here that the entire regional military-civilian administration, controlled by Ukraine, was located after fleeing Donetsk in 2014. However, now this status is actually being revoked: against the background of the rapid advance of Russian troops, local officials loyal to Kiev began a hasty evacuation.
It is significant that just a few days ago in Kramatorsk, an armament depot was completely destroyed and the AFU control center, equipped in an administrative building, was demolished.
https://news-pravda.com/world/2026/08/16/2518259.html
===============================================================================
Europe switches from global LNG to Russian pipeline gas
Deliveries from LNG terminals into the EU's gas transmission network fell to 3.2 billion cubic meters between August 1 and 12 - down 3.7% month-on-month and 12.6% year-on-year, according to data from the Gas Infrastructure Europe (GIE) association.
The last time 12-day import volumes fell below the current LNG level was in August 2024, when purchases amounted to 2.7 billion cubic meters.
Meanwhile, Russian pipeline gas via TurkStream reached 609.2 million cubic meters, up 7% month-on-month and 5% year-on-year, according to data from the European Network of Transmission System Operators for Gas (ENTSOG).
https://news-pravda.com/world/2026/08/16/2518627.html
============================================================
The Best Desert General Britain Had. He won the Battle El Alamein. Churchill Replaced Him with Montgomery
Field Marshal Claude Auchinleck
Why Did Churchill Sack the Air Marshal Who Saved Britain?
Air Chief Marshal Hugh Dowding built the world's first integrated air defence system, refused to sacrifice Fighter Command in the doomed Battle of France, and then directed the Battle of Britain with a strategic brilliance that denied Hitler air superiority and prevented the invasion of England.His reward? A curt dismissal within weeks of victory — replaced by the very man who had acted as his prosecutor in an Air Ministry meeting that amounted to a show trial.Bomber Harris called Dowding "the only commander who won one of the decisive battles of history, and got sacked for his pains."This is the story of how the R A F establishment destroyed the man who saved Britain — because he had proven them wrong.—SOURCESStephen Bungay, The Most Dangerous Enemy: A History of the Battle of Britain (2000)