From the category archives:

2010

Oil and gold prices are ending 2010 on new near-term breakout highs.  After a post-crash slump that kept oil around $60-$68, oil broke out to the $80-85 range for much of 2010, but in December oil’s made new breakouts yet again.
Just this past week or so, oil touched through $90 for the first time since [...]

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Stock markets reopen this year on a Wednesday.  Whenever Christmas Eve and Christmas Day fall on Friday and Saturday or Sunday, the usual holidays are already taken up by the weekend.  This means that many Federal institutions and businesses will declare an extra two days of holiday right after the weekend.
These extra holidays have occurred in [...]

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Bernanke did suggest the possibility of more quantitative easing, i.e., QE3 (let’s not lose count) last night on 60 Minutes.  He also said that in 10, 15 or 20 years’ time, “there won’t be any money left for the military or for any other services the government provides” (referring to the U.S., of course).
Lots of [...]

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Apparently the late-Friday surge in stock markets might have been due to the possibility that “the Ben Bernanke” will intimate the possibility of higher levels of QE2 than initially indicated.  More than $600 billion in Treasury purchases by June 2011, in other words.
Reuters caught sight of a report on the CBS website indicating that Bernanke [...]

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Rumor now has it that Wikileaks’ next leak will be the bust of a major American bank.  The exciting question, perhaps, is less what the details might be (we’ve basically seen it all over the past two years, if we’ve been paying attention) than what bank Wikileaks will bust.
Julian Assange, the creator of Wikileaks, did [...]

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Calls have been coming for a while to halt Saturday delivery by the US Postal Service (USPS) in order to cut back on costs, but this hasn’t stopped the USPS from raising pay checks in the meantime (and employee compensation has been estimated to be about 80% of their costs).
Yet just this past Friday, the [...]

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And none of them are likely to happen in any conceivable near-term time frame.
Gold is sitting pretty now above $1400/oz following the World Bank’s suggestion of a return to the gold standard – and it’s inevitably already drawing out commentators from the woodwork who want to talk about how overvalued gold is and the fact [...]

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