But many say there is something that makes the current gold peak stand out: There is simply no new major gold deposit left to be discovered.

...

Gold has been hovering around the psychological level of $1,300 an ounce since the beginning of this year -- a far cry from the highs of $1,800 an ounce witnessed in 2011-12. Analysts estimate that a minimum price of $1,500 per ounce is needed to maintain current production levels.

...

The prospective impact of a lack of "world class" discoveries on future gold production can be gauged from the fact that such mines account for nearly half of the global gold production today.

The average grade of the new gold deposits -- the amount of gold that can be extracted per ton -- has also been declining. The average mine grade has fallen from over 10 gram per ton in the early 1970s to around 1.4 grams per ton today, according to Metals Focus, a precious metals consultancy.

...

Analysts expect gold prices to rise in the longer term as gold mine supply struggles to expand. High prices and technological advancements are expected to push miners to explore new frontiers for the precious metal, including the seabed and possibly even asteroids.

...

"In future most of the gold supply will come from recycling and not mining," Miller said.

The World Gold Council expects the demand for gold in jewelry to increase over the next 30 years "in a richer, more middle-class, connected world."

The gap between the three-month and 10-year yields vanished as a surge of buying pushed the latter to a 14-month low of 2.416 percent. Inversion is considered a reliable harbinger of recession in the U.S., within roughly the next 18 months.

Demand for government bonds gained momentum Wednesday, when U.S. central bank policy makers lowered both their growth projections and their interest-rate outlook. The majority of officials now envisage no hikes this year, down from a median call of two at their December meeting. Traders took that dovish shift as their cue to dig into positions for a Fed easing cycle, pricing in a cut by the end of 2020 and a one-in-two chance of a reduction as soon as this year.

"It looks like the global slowdown worries have been confirmed and the market is beginning to price in Fed easing, potential recession down the road," said Kathy Jones, chief fixed-income strategist at Charles Schwab & Co.

...

C.L.O.s are nothing more than a package of risky corporate loans made to companies with less than stellar credit. The big Wall Street banks make these loans to their corporate clients and then seek to move them off their balance sheets as quickly as possible, in the same way that a decade ago they packaged up and offloaded risky mortgage securities. Just as with mortgage-backed securities, to move the loans out the door the banks have been counting on the nearly insatiable demand for higher yields ... This is not a tiny slice of the market. Of the trillions of dollars of corporate loans outstanding in the United States, roughly $1.2 trillion of them are considered "leveraged loans," or loans to companies considered bigger credit risks.

In a speech before the Economic Club of New York in November, Mr. Powell said he thought that investors in C.L.O.s would bear the brunt of an uptick in corporate bankruptcies, rather than the big Wall Street banks. Those investors include Japanese banks as well as investors in hedge funds, mutual funds and pension funds (in other words, you and me).

Janet Yellen, Mr. Powell's predecessor, aired the same concern in December, in a conversation with the Times columnist Paul Krugman. Ms. Yellen said she worried that corporate indebtedness was "quite high": it's now more than $9 trillion, up from $4.9 trillion, in 2006, according to the Securities Industry and Financial Markets Association. "I think a lot of the underwriting of that debt is weak," she said. "I think investors hold it in packages like the subprime packages," which became so popular before the 2008 crisis. "The same thing has happened. It's called C.L.O.s, or collateralized loan obligations."

...

After a brief moment of sanity in December, the loopy demand for high-risk debt has once again heated up. More than $13 billion of leveraged loans were sold in February, and they will soon worm their way into the financial markets as C.L.O.s. The existential question remains: Why do investors fail to learn the harsh lessons about risk, even though the consequences of them still remain so fresh?

A decade on from the subprime bubble, housing, which is not only shelter but also the biggest financial asset for most Americans, is the only major component of the CPI with a national inflation rate that is consistently above the overall number. Why is this? Because, just as Minsky would have predicted, loose monetary policy over the past several years buoyed assets, but didn't create meaningful new supply or, consequently, enough demand in construction and other home-related areas. The point is illustrated in an academic paper, "What the Federal Reserve got totally wrong about inflation and interest rate policy" from the Mario Einaudi Center for International Studies at Cornell University. As its author Daniel Alpert says: "What we have now is a form of inflation that's never been seen before -- it's all concentrated in housing."

At times, that relentless march of circumstance can produce results that look insane or visionary, depending on the month. Conceived in the wake of the 2008 recession and executed during the boom that followed, the megadevelopment opens onto a troubling future. The market for ultradeluxe condos is sagging, and we'll see whether that's one of the shocks that Hudson Yards is built to withstand. A dozen years ago, it seemed obvious that retail would prop up a shaky market for office space. Now the opposite is true. The 720,000-square-foot mall comes online even as storefronts are shuttering all over New York and Amazon threatens the whole concept of entering a shop with money and walking out with a shopping bag. On the other hand, businesses that were once squeamish about relocating to an uncertain frontier zone are now gobbling up square footage. Companies like Coach, L'Oréal, Warner Media, Wells Fargo, and Boston Consulting Group will cohabit with creations of the millennial boom like Stonepeak, and the demand for office space seems likely to outpace the current glut.

...

The New York Times explains why the tax makes sense in these cases and how the city is hurt right now without it. "The $238 million record purchase was a visceral reminder that when wealthy buyers like Mr. Griffin purchase expensive apartments as second homes or investments, New York City and the state get less financial benefits than if the home was owned as a primary residence. If the buyers live out of state, they are not subject to state or city income taxes, and do not pay New York sales tax while outside the state."

Mubadala, an Abu Dhabi investment fund, purchased 90% of the building for $800 million in 2008. Real estate firm Tishman Speyer had owned the other 10%.

The buyer is RFR Holding, a New York real estate company. Officials with Tishman and RFR did not immediately respond to a request for comments.

...

The incentive to sell the building at such a huge loss was due to the soaring rent the owners pay to Cooper Union, a New York college, for the land under the building. The rent is rising from $7.75 million last year to $32.5 million this year to $41 million in 2028.

Meantime, rents in the building itself are not rising nearly that fast. While the building is an iconic landmark in the New York skyline, it is competing against newer office towers with large floor-to-ceiling windows and all the modern amenities.

On Tuesday, lawmakers will vote for a second time on May's Brexit deal after initially rejecting it in January. If a simple majority of them don't approve the deal, they will then vote on whether they want to leave the 28-member bloc without a deal.

If they vote against a "no-deal" Brexit, they'll then have a vote on whether to extend Article 50 (which sets out the departure process) and delay Britain's departure which is currently set to take place on March 29.

...

More than half (53 percent) of Americans aged 21 to 37 have received some form of financial assistance from a parent, guardian or family member since turning 21, according to a 2018 report by Country Financial, a financial services firm in Bloomington, Ill. This may include paying bills for a cellphone (41 percent), groceries and gas (32 percent), rent (40 percent) or health insurance (32 percent).

Then there are the free services. Ms. Palmer, who is 39 and lives near Washington, D.C., said that the free 20 to 25 hours of child care she receives every month from her parents contributed to her family's decision to have a third child

...

On average, each millennial parent receives $11,011 per year in combined financial support and unpaid labor, the 2017 TD Ameritrade Millennial Parents Survey found, for an annual total of $253 billion in America.

...

Those who do not have parental assistance in their 30s, however, continue to be at a disadvantage. "They are grappling with paying off student-loan debt, their savings might not be as strong because of that, and many are taking care of other family members," said Iimay Ho, 32, the executive director at Resource Generation, an organization that works with people age 18 to 35 with wealth or class privilege to engage on issues of inequality.

...

Evidence suggests that purchasing a home, a life event that many hope to reach in their 30s and one of the primary ways people build wealth, is essentially out of reach in most major cities unless your family has generated a good deal of wealth. (Nationally, homeownership rates are falling for millennials, and only two in 10 have a mortgage or home loan.)

The "21st century as one long recession" comment is dead-on.

...

Workism offers a perilous trade-off. On the one hand, Americans' high regard for hard work may be responsible for its special place in world history and its reputation as the global capital of start-up success. A culture that worships the pursuit of extreme success will likely produce some of it. But extreme success is a falsifiable god, which rejects the vast majority of its worshippers. Our jobs were never meant to shoulder the burdens of a faith, and they are buckling under the weight. A staggering 87 percent of employees are not engaged at their job, according to Gallup. That number is rising by the year.

...

One solution to this epidemic of disengagement would be to make work less awful. But maybe the better prescription is to make work less central... This can start with public policy. There is new enthusiasm for universal policies--like universal basic income, parental leave, subsidized child care, and a child allowance--which would make long working hours less necessary for all Americans. These changes alone might not be enough to reduce Americans' devotion to work for work's sake, since it's the rich who are most devoted. But they would spare the vast majority of the public from the pathological workaholism that grips today's elites, and perhaps create a bottom-up movement to displace work as the centerpiece of the secular American identity.

On a deeper level, Americans have forgotten an old-fashioned goal of working: It's about buying free time...

Although Musk corrected his mistake, regulators berated Musk for once again publishing "inaccurate and material information about Tesla to his over 24 million Twitter followers." The SEC said Musk had not asked for or received company approval before sending the tweet, as required by the settlement.

...

If Nathan does side with the SEC and rules that Musk was in contempt for violating the settlement deal, she'll have a range of options to punish Musk and dissuade him from breaking the agreement again. Consequences could range from a fine, to limiting further social media use, to his removal as CEO.

Troubles at Kraft Heinz also cut deeply into the investing giant's bottom line. In his annual letter to investors posted Saturday, Buffett said the company took a $3 billion write down last year "arising almost entirely from our equity interest in Kraft Heinz.

The loss was driven by big price declines in Berkshire's investment portfolio, including Apple, which remains its largest holding.

...

Buffett said Berkshire does not see any potential takeover targets in the coming year -- but the firm is hungry to make an "elephant-sized acquisition."

This wave of dissatisfaction is especially perverse because corporations now have access to decades of scientific research about how to make jobs better. "We have so much evidence about what people need," says Adam Grant, a professor of management and psychology at the University of Pennsylvania (and a contributing opinion writer at The Times). Basic financial security, of course, is critical -- as is a sense that your job won't disappear unexpectedly. What's interesting, however, is that once you can provide financially for yourself and your family, according to studies, additional salary and benefits don't reliably contribute to worker satisfaction. Much more important are things like whether a job provides a sense of autonomy -- the ability to control your time and the authority to act on your unique expertise. People want to work alongside others whom they respect (and, optimally, enjoy spending time with) and who seem to respect them in return.

And finally, workers want to feel that their labors are meaningful. "You don't have to be curing cancer," says Barry Schwartz, a visiting professor of management at the University of California, Berkeley. We want to feel that we're making the world better, even if it's as small a matter as helping a shopper find the right product at the grocery store. "You can be a salesperson, or a toll collector, but if you see your goal as solving people's problems, then each day presents 100 opportunities to improve someone's life, and your satisfaction increases dramatically," Schwartz says.

This was a predictable consequence of an increasingly unstable, insecure economy. There is really no refuge from it; even the rich know they have to always be searching for the next "score" (the middle class and below obviously have it even worse -- but with the meso-rich feeling the pain, at least the problem is becoming impossible to ignore). At this site, this is the sort of thing we've expected as a consequence of the long-run gutting of the financial economy, with low interest rates and disincentives to save and invest in long-term, stable enterprises (VC money and credit cards are NOT a suitable substitute for traditional commercial and merchant banking).