The Who, What, When, Why, & Where...

WHO: Which investments will deliver the most?

Today's "Weird" Markets

These are the kind of markets that test the courage of investors.

GOLD

Fundamentals on gold remain intact. If anything, they have improved under todays widespread crashing credit conditions, inflation and material shortages. The long-term fundamentals for gold look healthy. The long-term supply constraints have not disappeared and demand continues to remain robust.

The fact that gold did not head higher during the current leg of the [global financial] crisis seems to reflect a combination of the rise in the U.S. Dollar, de-leveraging of commodity positions, sales to meet margins calls on other assets and the unwinding of the long gold-short dollar trade by some investors. This situation will not continue much longer.

U.S. Dollar

Since July 2008, the U.S. dollar has staged its most dramatic rally in years. However, from a fundamental standpoint, the dollars position has worsened significantly. Trillions of dollars of are being created to bail out financial institutions and local economies.

When the dollar was taken off the gold standard in 1971, there no longer was any discipline on the money creation (printing) process. As a matter of act, two years ago, the U.S. changed its laws so that it no longer had to report how much money was printed. No one knows exactly how much is printed. Once a currency is on this path

The U.S. federal government is already operating at the mercy of foreign creditors because domestic savings have already been consumed. What was at one time the richest country in the world, the U.S. is now the biggest debtor in the world. The federal governments debt is growing the fastest and politicians are spending the country into bankruptcy.

History - The Greatest Teacher (aka "Wisdom")

True fortunes are made during times of economic distress or financial corrections. Only one year before J.P. Morgan completed the formation of U.S. Steel (which financial historians have called the deal of the 20th century), he said that such a feat could never be accomplished by any man - until the markets crashed. The depressed valuations of the companies involved allowed him to purchase the business entities at a fraction of what they had been selling for twelve months earlier.