John T. Reed’s news blog

One of the gold companies has also been touting silver lately. I bought some this past year. I wanted my wife to sell some gold she inherited but she would not, so I asked if we could at least convert half of it to silver. She agreed.So I watch the gold eagle and silver coins wholesale prices in each weekday Wall Street Journal (listed in a daily section called “Cash Prices”)Silver has been going down lately. Since I bought it as a hedge against USD inflation. The daily price of silver is irrelevant to my use of it. In the...

Regarding moving the US embassy to Jerusalem: It is nobody’s business other than the U.S. where it’s Israel embassy is. I am especially incensed to learn that past presidents have promised to do it then reneged for fear of violence. That is the kind of wimpiness that has turned America into a paper tiger since WW II—and done great damage to us like the 58,000 who died in Vietnam.On the other hand, my fictional Unelected President “Mike Medlock” would move all the funny-hat country embassies to the U.S. In other words, the ambassador to Israel would be in DC. Why? Because...

I do not recommend bitcoin as a store of value. It is interesting as a better, faster, cheaper SWIFT wire, but you must get a trustworthy guarantor of the bitcoin transfer. For example, ask Wells Fargo to transfer $20,000 to Westpac Bank in Australia. They can use bitcoin for that if they want, but if anything goes wrong, Wells Fargo gives you your money back. As far as as I know, neither Wells nor any other traditional bank currently offers bitcoin transfer service.I am greatly alarmed by the popularity of Bitcoin. If you don’t own it now, don’t buy it....

They completed refurbishing the Times Square National Debt Clock yesterday. You can also see it on line where it never left. It changes in real time like a runaway train 24/7..http://www.usdebtclock.org/.Click on it to see the moving numbers. I say the most important number is the debt-to-GDP ratio. If it is above 60%, you cannot join the EU. We don’t want to join the EU, but it is telling that at 106% we would have no hope of being approved. A couple of bench marks: It was 17% when FDR took office, 31% when Reagan took office. We were the...

Trump just honored the WW II Navajo Code talkers. They seem to be nice old men. They served in the Marines in the Pacific during World War II which was dangerous. But the notions that they were more heroic than ordinary riflemen or that two guys speaking Navajo on the radio in a combat zone was a satisfactory secret code is dopey on its face. Here is an article I wrote about it when the movie about that came out: A movie (Wind Talkers) says that Navajo Code Talkers used an unbreakable code decisively in the Pacific during World War...