Financial Sense Blog

The focus of this month’s post will be about gold and the gold shares. Will the price of gold record 10 straight years of gains, or might it be in for a correction? A good starting point might be to understand what happened to gold and the gold stocks in the 1920’s & 1930’s, and why.

Dock Treece discusses the dissenting opinion that the U.S. equities markets is very near the end of a ten-year bear market and comments on the market's outlook going forward.

Following the European Central Bank's (ECB) press conference following its monthly meeting, President Trichet's main task was to boost credibility. As Trichet makes abundantly clear, the ECB is"inflexibly attached to price stability." To achieve its goal, however, he could have added the ECB needs to be inflexibly flexible. When quizzed on the ECB bond purchase program, a program that may take the ECB down a slippery road of money printing should it not be properly neutralized, Trichet discussed three elements: the purpose, the design and observation of the program.

As I discussed in my February article, “Palladium Still Shines,” palladium is a versatile element used in everything from electronics to polyester production to cancer therapy. In most applications, such as autocatalysts, cheaper metals can't be substituted. In fact, if hydrogen-based fuel cells become significant in local power and automotive applications, those high-tech uses would also require palladium.

A momentous shift in the financial realm occurred at the turn of the millennium, but did so without fireworks -- not a single squib was heard on its behalf. After all, the gold market had long and dutifully languished, languished so utterly weary with its own 20-year bearish attitude that the proverbial "rock-bottom" was struck at $250 (and not just once but rather twice, as if to re-emphasize contempt at the price tag), a price so absurdly low it triggered a cathartic purging of all further legitimate bearish opinion on the matter. (Illegitimate bearish opinion continues to this day and suffers accordingly.)

The Obama Administration and senior BP officials are frantically working not to stop the world’s worst oil disaster, but to hide the true extent of the actual ecological catastrophe. Senior researchers tell us that the BP drilling hit one of the oil migration channels and that the leakage could continue for years unless decisive steps are undertaken, something that seems far from the present strategy.

While it may feel like we have entered a new bear market and that nothing like this has happened before, history paints a different picture. Markets move primarily based on greed and fear.

We heard the term “green shoots” nearly ad nauseam last year as economic data was still poor, just decidedly less so as analysts cited “less bad” data as a sign of an improving economic and stock market outlook. Analysts were correct and eventually less bad turned into simply “good.”