Central banks

Have you wondered why stocks like Apple, Microsoft and Google continue to make big gains in the U.S. indexes such as the Dow-Jones Industrials? These are the kind of big, successful companies that central banks favor.

For more than two hundred years, practically all of even the most free market advocates have assumed that money and banking were different from other types of goods and markets.

Transparency, therefore, has little to do with being accountable to the political branches of government. It’s about allaying the concerns of the financial market in the face of accommodative monetary policy.

“Gold is money. Everything else is credit.” — John Pierpont Morgan

Central banks bought 534.6 tons of gold during 2012, the largest amount in 48 years. Interest is clearly growing in gold as an international monetary asset as more countries have…