A: I don’t know, but lower. I have substantial suspicions about the ability of the Federal Reserve to exit QE, however. What they are doing is liquefying the banks and issuing more debt than they can sell. Right now, new aggregate on-balance liabilities on the Federal level is $1.5 trillion per year. They finance that by selling $750 billion of debt, and by printing up $750 billion of debt which they use to buy existing bonds. The off-balance-sheet liabilities of the Treasury exceed $60 trillion and grow by about $4 trillion a year.
The idea that we are going to get through this without either defaulting on our obligations or inflating them away defies any rational analysis of the problem.
From my point of view you’re safer with gold in your portfolio. Experts who follow the market closely, including Eric Sprott, but also Morgan Stanley and the big bullion banks, say that the ‘anti-gold’ – what you consider in place of gold – is the U.S. 10-year Treasury. Mainstream institutional investors say that gold is ‘risk-on’ and the 10-year Treasury is ‘risk-off,’ but I think that the world has it exactly confused. The U.S. Treasury -- the ‘anti-gold’ -- pays a 1.75% interest rate, which is well below the rate of inflation and assumes that there is no credit risk with regards to U.S. obligations. If nothing else, the lower interest rate lowers the cost – in terms of avoided cost – of owning gold
- Source, Rick Rule via Sprott's Thoughts:
