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Jerome Powell’s speech at Jackson Hole conceded a half-point rate cut at the September meeting was possible and, while the future looked cloudy immediately after that, nothing was going to stop President Trump and next year’s Fed from continuing to lower rates.

As if that wasn’t enough of a hint, I closed out my market commentary noting that: “It looks like the rally, when it comes, is going to be big.” Well, big it has been. So big it makes me nervous.

Case in point: Friday we got yet another big miss on the nonfarm payrolls number. August jobs came in at just 22,000 against the consensus expectation of 75,000. The downward revisions of the prior two months weren’t overly large for a change, at only 21,000, but the unemployment rate rose to 4.3%.
 

The metals behaved just as expected on the confirming news. Although I believe gold is headed much, much higher, I want that uptrend to last years. Not only is this torrid rise in danger of burning out, but gold seems to be predicting something quite dramatic ahead. Our chart of gold’s Bollinger Bands here shows the extreme jump in volatility over the last few trading sessions.

The good news is that investors are working down from majors into juniors, even while the juniors — the best of which are now flush with cash — are generating big news. A big development was the merger of Elemental Altus Royalties Corp. (ELEMF) and EMX Royalty Corp. (EMX), with a concurrent $100 million investment by Tether.

Tether had already invested heavily into Elemental, calling gold “natural Bitcoin.” That’s a compelling sign that gold — money for 5,000 years but regarded as a tinfoil-hat asset since 1971 — has gone mainstream.

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