"Any house bought for 'No Money Down' should become a no money home, a free gift to the debtor. How's that for putting a floor under prices...?" Remember the great hope for Hope Now...? "Let's not harp on about the costs, absurdities or risks of governments meddling in real-estate bubbles when they ...read more

"Inflation and deflation are both a crisis in money. Which leaves gold as a secure store of wealth against both monetary panics..." The 1970s didn’t just curse the world with cheap German wine and the Bay City Rollers. That decade gave us soaring inflation, too. Gold's stellar run up to $850 per ounce, ...read more

"...Gold is demonstrably not the ultimate inflation hedge. Nor is it anything much compared to stocks, bonds or real estate..." "The twilight of gold appeared to have arrived," wrote Niall Ferguson – now a Harvard professor, then an Oxford scholar – of the metal's 20-year bear market at the end of ...read more

"Gold-backed money retained its real value for 350 years in the United States and Great Britain. It's only just clawed back to that level for investors today..." By the time the War of the Spanish Succession was finished in 1715, the French King – who admitted that he "loved war too ...read more

"Gold must hit $2,200 an ounce to match its real peak of Jan. 1980. Or so almost everyone thinks..." What’s in a number? Ignoring the day-to-day noise, more than a handful of gold dealers and analysts reckon gold will hit $2,200 an ounce before this bull market is done. Why? Because that's ...read more

Private bank stockholders aren't so much being crowded out as thrown out the window... Now, I'm no banking analyst, but that gap on my resumé is starting to look like a very good thing indeed. For who'd want to be stuck with the title "Banking Stock Analyst" now the banks are all ...read more

“Well, God knows you don’t need any brains to buck barley bags...” — John Steinbeck, Of Mice and Men (1937) Alpha used to be what hedge-fund managers promised their clients. Better still, portable alpha — defined in the easy bed-time reading of finance MBAs as the “generation of excess return over a benchmark ...read more

“I say, I say, I say — Did you hear about the joke of a central banker...?” Shock and awe was never supposed to be the Bank of England’s approach. “Predictable,” even “stolid” were meant to be this ancient institution’s watchwords. The current chief, Mervyn King, proclaimed it so. Time and again. “Our ...read more

“...Prolonged inflation (and, especially hyperinflation) cannot continue without increases in the monetary base...” “A country’s long-run inflation is caused primarily, or perhaps exclusively, by increases in its own monetary base,” wrote Richard G. Anderson — a vice-president and senior economist at the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis — in a ...read more

“...Take a look at this chart of gold prices measured in the top 10 most important world currencies...” So the spot gold price sank in October, dropping right back to 13-month lows at $683 an ounce. After failing to breach $930, this collapse marked the third step lower from March’s all-time high ...read more