Financial Sense Blog

We've got it easy right now. Click or call, and you can quickly and conveniently own a gold coin or bar. But if global concerns cause another panic or the dollar breaks down, you could find yourself standing in a line at the local coin shop or getting a busy signal. Simply, for reasons I’ll discuss here, you may find it very difficult to get your hands on physical gold when that time comes.

Since the US economy has failed to recover as widely predicted, pressure on the Federal Reserve to conjure a solution has increased. In fact, the Fed now faces the hardest choices in its history. It can either redouble its past efforts to re-inflate America's bubble economy (risking the destruction of the US dollar) or it can stop pumping and let the economy deflate to a self-sustaining level. Unfortunately, both choices guarantee severe economic pain - but only one offers the possibility of ultimate success.

After its worst August in years the stock market has rallied back strongly in expectation that the Federal Reserve will initiate a second round of policy ‘easing’ that will re-stimulate the recovery. The Fed is not saying whether it will or won’t, alternately holding out the carrot and then withdrawing it, keeping investors and traders uncertain but hopeful.

One key element of our investment process at U.S. Global Investors is tracking and monitoring government policies. We believe policies are precursors to changes in the marketplace and taking a look at year-to-date performance of the S&P 500 Index is a good way to illustrate how.

$2,000,000,000,000.00 dollars has been stolen from the US Treasury!! What happened? Who did it? Did they get away with it?

As of 7/14/2010 the U.S. Dollar Index switched from a Trend Model BUY signal to NEUTRAL. This is one of those cases where the Trend Model 20/50-EMA crossover occurred while the 50-EMA was still above the 200-EMA, therefore, a NEUTRAL signal results instead of a sell.

Interview with Bradley LaLonde, Co-founder, Partner and CEO, Vietnam Partners, LLC.

In a book titled How We Survived Communism and Even Laughed, Slavenka Drakulić wrote, "in the West today 'the end of communism' has become a stock phrase, a truism, a common expression ... to indicate the current state of things in Eastern Europe." We mustn't be naive about the fall of communism, she says. "It sounds marvelous when you hear it in political speeches or read it in the newspapers," Drakulić admits. "The reality is that communism persists in the way people behave, in the looks on their faces, in the way they think."

The world is afraid of a repeat of the deflation of the Great Depression. Deflation is a negative drop in prices caused by the contraction of money supply, the opposite of inflation. In 1932, US consumer prices fell 10 percent and between 1929 and 1933 fell 27 percent in total. Today despite inflation at 40 year lows, prices are still going up, not down. In the 12 months ended in August, prices rose 1.1 percent.

A detailed review of how reduced drilling in the Gulf of Mexico is impacting natural gas production.