Explanations of "Gold" investment-related terms A to Z

Can you imagine a world without a GDP? It’s not easy, is it? That’s because GDP is the key widely used indicator. But it’s a recent invention. Prior the WWII and the Great Depression, there was no national statistics. Economist relied on freight hauling data, stock market (with Dow Jones as key index) and mainly industrial production to get the picture of the overall economy.

The increase in the prices of goods caused by the increases in the money supply. In connection with this underlying cause, you can also hear terms such as wage inflation and cost inflation. The former looks at the wage component as an inflationary driver, while the latter posits that inflation relates to the increased cost side.

An inflation hedge is an investment that maintains or increases its value over time. Hence, an inflation hedge should provide protection against the depreciation of the currency. For example, fixed rate bonds are a poor hedge against inflation. If one invest in a bond that gives a 3 percent return, but inflation rate is 5 percent, they are actually losing their purchasing power. On the other hand, most ‘hard assets’ are believed to be excellent inflation hedges. These hard assets are oil, farmland or gold.

In economics, an interest rate is the ratio in the mutual valuation of present goods against future goods. Since people prefer goods now to later, in a free market there will be a positive interest rate to reward deferring consumption. From the financial point of view, an interest rate is a rate at which interest is paid by borrowers (debtors) for the use of money that they borrow from lenders (creditors). To simplify, an interest rate is the cost of borrowing money, typically expressed as an annual percentage of principal.

Have you ever wondered why the Neanderthals went extinct, despite being individually stronger than us and having bigger brains? What gave homo sapiens a decisive competitive advantage over our distant cousins was international trade, back then called intertribal trade. It turns out that our species has conducted such trade for tens of thousands of years, in contrast to other species of hominids. This is what the archaeologists suggest: while they found that our ancestors imported both materials and finished products as ivory, stones, fossils, seashells and crafted tools were found dispersed through many Homo Sapiens sites. There is no evidence of such trade in case of Neanderthals. Instead, each group manufactured its own tools from local materials. They were self-sufficient. And they died.

The inverse head and shoulders formation (also known as reverse head and shoulders formation) is one of the most popular and reliable formations used in technical analysis. As the name suggests, it has a shape similar to the head and shoulder. This head and shoulders bottom pattern usually signals a change in price trend. When it occurs the security is likely to move against the previous downtrend. In other words, a completed inverse head and shoulders in gold means that gold is likely to rally.

Software programs designed to support decision process on multiple levels. Unlike analysts, investment tools are completely unemotional and objective, which allows for diversification between these two sources of signals. Such diversification can substantially lower the risk (variability) without compromising profitability. In fact, if tools are accurate, investor's and trader's profitability can increase.

A major regional power. The country with world's largest natural gas supply and the fourth largest proven oil reserves. A heir to the Persian Empire. A theocracy governed by an autocratic Supreme Leader. Iran. What are its links with the gold market?

Janet Yellen was born on the 13th of August , 1946 in New York City. She received her Ph.D. in economics from Yale University in 1971. She wrote her dissertation under the supervision of Nobel laureates James Tobin and Joseph Stiglitz – and she married George Akerlof, another Nobel laureate in economics. She worked in academia for many years, but later started her public service. In 1997-1999, she served as Chair of President Bill Clinton’s Council of Economic Advisers. From 2004 until 2010, Yellen was the President of the San Francisco Fed. In 2010, she became a vice-chair of the Fed, and in 2014 she replaced Ben Bernanke as Chair. She maintained the position until 2018, when Jerome Powell took her place.

Jerome Powell was born on February 4, 1953 in Washington, D.C. He does not have a PhD in economics – instead, he earned a Juris Doctor degree from Georgetown University Law Center in 1979. Under President George H. W. Bush, he worked as Undersecretary of the Treasury. He also has rich experience in the private sector – for example, in 1997-2005, he was a partner at the Carlyle Group, a New York-based private equity firm.

He is a current Federal Reserve Governor – he took office on May 25, 2012, to fill the unexpired term of Frederic Mishkin. In 2014, he was nominated for another term ending January 31, 2028.

On November 2, President Donald Trump nominated Powell to be the next Fed Chair. He took office on February 5, 2018, replacing Janet Yellen in that position.

What does someone do when he or she loses a job? The range of options is quite wide. Some people get drunk and curse the boss, other need to talk with a life companion of family. The smart reaction is, of course, to look for a new job, but if there are no vacancies at the moment, an option worth considering is to apply for the unemployment benefit.

There is no subtler, no surer means of overturning the existing basis of society than to debauch the currency. The process engages all the hidden forces of economic law on the side of destruction, and does it in a manner which not one man in a million is able to diagnose.

In the long run we are all dead. Well, unless we find the elixir of immortality, this is true. And this is certainly true for John Maynard Keynes who has been dead for many years. He was born in 1883 in Cambridge, England and died in 1946 near Firle, Sussex. He graduated from Cambridge (receiving B.A. in 1905 and an M.A. in 1909) and joined the British civil service soon after. During the World War I, he served in the Treasury. He resigned after the Versaille conference, as he opposed the unreasonable punitive reparation demands from Germany after the war. Keynes expressed his views in a book titled “The Economic Consequences of the Peace”, which made him famous.