Frank Trotter on Wealth Disparity, and More Top Quotes from a San Francisco Investment Show

Frank Trotter on Wealth Disparity – and More Top Quotes from a San Francisco Investment Show

Weeks ago we were delighted to attend an investment conference in San Francisco called The Silver Summit & Resource Expo.

Speakers included well-known voices in the investment community such as Grant Williams, Frank Holmes, Frank Trotter, and Rick Rule. The show was also supplemented with people that have helped to build multi-billion companies: precious metals pioneers such as Ross Beaty, Rob McEwen, and Keith Neumeyer, or mine-finders such as David Lowell.

After attending the show, we reached out to some of the speakers that had piqued our interest. We asked them to send us a key talking point along with the data to back it up.

Jeffrey Christian, from CPM Group, supplied us with a quote and data on the silver market. In his analysis, he’s found the price of silver is highly related to the net additions and net withdrawals in the silver market. When investors buy silver, the price rallies. When net inventories are dropping, the opposite happens. He noted, “If investors want to buy 100 million oz per year, as they are in 2015, prices will decline from current levels. If they want to buy 150 million oz or more, as they did a few years ago, prices will rise back to $20-25/oz.”

Frank Holmes of U.S. Global Investors, in his note to our team, focused on the depreciating currencies of economies that heavily rely on commodity exports. After showing how these national currencies have fared against the U.S. dollar, he added that it is important to see some stabilization in these currencies before investors can expect to see any bounceback in resource demand.

Frank Trotter of EverBank showed us a chart on less-examined effects of the Fed’s policies since the Financial Crisis affecting wealth disparity. Specifically, he is looking at total household financial assets – in other words, who is holding the wealth in the United States. Frank writes, “The Fed policy has created an asset owners bonanza. From 2008 to 2014, Total Household Financial Assets have grown $19.5 trillion; our estimate is that $15 trillion, or 80% is enjoyed by the top 8% of households.”

This last point brought up by Trotter is something that we’ve talked about regularly. Specifically, in this chart of the week we showed that the top 10% of earners are the only group that has fully recovered since pre-crisis levels of income, and that the amount of Americans below the poverty line has increased by 9.4 million since 2007. The Philadelphia Fed, for example, has admitted that these policies have likely contributed to income equality, but this information is still not talked about enough by the public.

The next two Cambridge Shows are in mid-January: Vancouver Resource Investment Conference 2016 (Jan 24-25, 2016) and the Cantech Investment Conference in Toronto (Jan 26, 2016).