It’s been a tough market to trade. There’s no real momentum. No one really knows what’s going on. One day, you’re up three percent. The next, down four. Who knows why these things happen. The story making the rounds in the papers is that…

“U.S. financial firms have taken write downs and losses of $666.1 billion since the beginning of 2007,” according to Bloomberg. There you have it. The number of the bust. The financial end times rolled on yesterday. The latest twist is the…

“In my own case, the Depression brought a strange result,” writes Eddie Cantor in 1931. “Before the crash, I had a million dollars, a house, three cars and four daughters. Now all I’ve got left is five daughters.” Eddie Cantor (1892-1964)…

A lot of readers are twanging on me for refraining to castigate President-elect Obama for deeds yet undone. They’re discouraged by the advisors and cabinet secretaries he’s picked, ostensibly because the crew coming in are Washington…

One of the conditions of employment as managing editor for Whiskey & Gunpowder—aside from rabid adherence to Austrian School economics—was relocation to Baltimore. I really didn’t think much of it at the time. I’d spent nearly my…

There are a lot of ways to kill something, either slowly or quickly.  As for a living thing, you can shoot it, run over it, or use some other instant way of getting rid of it.  There are slow ways, such as poison administered gradually, or perhaps…

Markets are dithering their way to the end of the year. It doesn’t look like much is happening. But some interesting things are going on. Pressure is building. For example, the dividend yield on the S&P 500 is 3.48%. The yield on a 30-year…

I have a good friend named Bill who lives on the convergence of two tidal streams in an area aptly named: Twin Rivers.  Last year his bulkhead was destroyed in a severe storm.  The problem with repairing a bulkhead is that it is underwater, and…

In the twilight of the Bush days, in the twilight of the twilight season, a consensus has formed that we are headed into a long, dark passage leading we know not where. Even CNBC’s Lawrence Kudlow has been reduced to searching for stray…

I remember back when I was learning attack planning and tactics during Navy flight school.  One of the key concepts was “time on target.” That is, when there were going to be a whole lot of airplanes coming in to deliver payload, you…

Sometimes you have to just stand back and admire the extremes a real bubble can produce. What you have now, as Bill explained a few nights ago at the Doomer’s Ball, is the last greatest bubble of them all, the bubble in U.S. bonds. It’s…

Sometimes you have to just stand back and admire the extremes a real bubble can produce. What you have now, as Bill explained a few nights ago at the Doomer’s Ball, is the last greatest bubble of them all, the bubble in U.S. bonds. It’s…

Lately I’ve been discussing concept of scarcity in the energy and natural resource sectors. In one recent note, I discussed how the idea of scarcity has transformed from a “geological” basis to an “above ground” basis. In another note I…

The late November rally in gold prices wasn’t quite as spectacular as mid-September’s gain, but it was still impressive. There was good follow-through too, though the momentum softened as bulls knocked on resistance near $850. The rally was a…

Gold bulls are going to attempt to raid Comex’s vaults by forcing delivery on their December futures contracts (tomorrow, Dec. 19). Who can tell how that will go? I can’t. But it’ll be interesting to watch. Facts: The open interest in futures…

The peak oil story has not been nullified by the scramble to unload every asset for cash — including whomping gobs of oil contracts — during this desperate season of bank liquidation. The main implication of the peak oil story is that we…

“…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…

OK, so I don’t have a copy of the Sunday business section from next March. But I think I know what at least one major issue will be within the next 24 months. The headlines will scream, “Power Failures, Price Spikes Plague Northeast U.S.” And…

Now to the big subject of the day: Inflation. You’d think evidence of even bigger deficits in the U.S. is clearly inflationary. But not everyone thinks so. The new prophet of doom, Dr. Nouriel Roubini, says at least four factors are setting up…

Along with the market decline, the price of oil has fallen. It’s down 50% within three months. Back when oil hit $147 per barrel in July, I said that the price “ought” to be in the range of $100-110, with the possibility of a drop into the…

“…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…

“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…

If you’re sick of the gloom and doom permeating markets right now, you can find solace in one investment… Well, it’s actually a type of investment. I’m not talking about options or shorting or even bonds. We still like to buy low and sell…

Under Bernanke’s direction, the Federal Reserve has completely rewritten its mission. Many articles in the International Speculator and The Casey Report have reported the strange growth in the loans they have made and explained that Bernanke has,…

“How do you feel about the election?” we were asked by a friend at the pub a few nights ago. “I have a cold. I don’t feel very well.” “But about the election? About Obama?” “Well, it’s great that a black man can be elected…

The current occupant of the White House has sedulously prepared for his successor the biggest shit sandwich the world has ever seen, and there is naturally some concern that Mr. Obama might choke on it. The dilemma is essentially this: The consumer…

There has never been a better time than right now to buy stocks. I know what you’re thinking — it sounds strange considering the enormous volatility in the market. But, I’m not talking about just any old stocks. I’m talking about stocks that…

I often mention that I live in Pittsburgh. Well, the truth is that I live in a leafy suburb of Pittsburgh. I grew up in the Steel City. But when I got married I moved to the suburbs to be near my wife. Life in the Leafy Suburbs There is a problem…

I was looking through my pocket-copy of the U.S. Constitution for the “Bailout Clause.” I must have missed it. If any readers out there can find the Bailout Clause, please send me a note and let me know where it is. There is, however, a…

The G-20 came to Washington for the weekend and sucked all the air out of the city before announcing that they were really serious about patching all the leaks in the foundering ship of globalism. Well, they have to at least pretend that they are…

Society functions best when each individual minds his own business…literally. When concerns are local and governments miniscule — just doing modest things like protecting property rights and enforcing contracts — then things generally work…

“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…

There is nothing so sad as to see an elderly person with a whole medicine cabinet full of various prescription drugs, which are regularly taken several times a day and for some strange reason their health doesn’t seem to improve. Thousands of…

Though Citicorp is deemed too big to fail, it’s hardly reassuring to know that it’s been allowed to sink its fangs into the Mother Zombie that the U.S. Treasury has become and sucked out a multi-billion dollar dose of embalming fluid so it can…

As the fiesta of “globalism” (Tom Friedman-style) draws to a close — another consequence of currency problems — we’ll have to figure out how to make things in this country again. We will not be manufacturing things at the scale, or in the…

One night we sat with Mr. Richmond and Mr. Dalton, this time joined by Mr. Skye, the five of us enjoying some precious tea and sweet corn bread following a meal. Skye happened to glance over to a little round table next to our rocker upon which sat…

“Taking the long view, we are running out of dirt.” —David R. Montgomery, geologist Over the summer, Iran bought a large amount — more than ONE million tons — of wheat from the U.S. That’s something we’ve not seen in 27 summers. In…

Well, it sure beats trying to secure an inter-bank loan or raising cash from the stock market right now. “After one of the worst days of trading on the Irish stock market, Ireland’s Government granted a sweeping unlimited guarantee on all bank…

EVERY ONCE IN a while, a report comes out from a government agency that’s so unassumingly candid you’re forced to admit a mistake has been made and that the document was mistakenly leaked, or that its author will soon be fired. I couldn’t help…

In 1913, President Woodrow Wilson was successful in publishing the Federal Reserve Act through Congress. The act allowed the government to establish the third central bank in the nation’s history. Think of the Fed as the bank of banks, and the…

I was in France the last time the markets sold off. Every time I leave the country, the markets go in the tank. But seriously, I’m sitting here watching the market as if it were some drama reaching a climactic conclusion. We live in truly…

Some of the greatest economic shifts in history are associated with big political swings, if not with politicians by name. Think of Hooverism, Roosevelt’s New Deal, Reaganism or British Thatcherism. But those are just labels. Things are not as…

Out of the thousands of hedge funds in existence, hundreds are closing up shop and liquidating, if the latest trading action was any indication. Many of these hedge funds should never have been started to begin with, because their illusory gains…

“…If we allow governments to control finance, we give them extraordinary power over which projects are allowed and which are deemed inappropriate…” The BRITISH PRIME MINISTER, Gordon Brown, says the current mess in world finance and…

“If you crossed the street blindfolded, you’d probably be OK. But the consequences of being wrong are so great, it’s a bad idea.” — Bill Bonner, Founder of Agora The “financialization” of the American economy is an era coming to a…

The title of this alert just means the value of something is what the market says it is. It does not mean that value won’t change tomorrow, and it does not mean that if the direction of the market changes tomorrow, it was wrong about today. If the…

The approved version of the bailout bill DOES extend the production tax credit (PTC) for renewable energy by one year. This is good news. Under current tax law, the PTC will expire on Dec. 31, 2008. Any renewable energy system that is not installed…

The G-7 world, the club of “developed” western nations plus Japan, has commenced an ordeal of suddenly waking up much poorer. All the desperate work-arounds being engineered by governments and central banks on an al fresco basis are intended to…

Welcome to Murphy’s Market. If you sold out of the stock market last year — or even back in June or early July 2008 — you probably feel pretty good right now. And if you took the cash and spread it around to a group of well-run banks, so as to…

Before you do anything precipitous — like sell your last stocks and stuff the cash into your mattress — let’s ask a few more questions. If you sell out now, what price will you get? A low price, right? So if you sell now, you will leave a lot…

The bell of American finance has cracked. It was a long time coming, as I’ll show you. The biggest change in the American economy in the last generation or so has been the rise of finance at the expense of making things. This seemed to work for a…

“What we thought was a wall of liquidity, turned out to be a wall of leverage.” — Paul Davies in the FT, quoting “a number of senior bankers…” Wanna know why your stock market shares keep on tumbling, right back to what one Fox News…

In the spirit of humility, let’s take a moment to examine whether we’re simply wrong about our main investment thesis: that extraordinary measures adopted by central bankers and government officials will result in tremendous inflation, and thus…

It’s fascinating to read the commentators in mainstream journals like The Financial Times and The Wall Street Journal all strenuously pretending that “the worst is over” (maybe…we hope…fingers crossed…hail Mary full of…

“You can’t blame the king of Persia for printing up money no one could trust. His neighbors in China were doing the same, after all, and with the same inevitable consequences, too…” Creating money from nothing to try and keep the economy…

There are only two things gold bulls should worry about from this point forward, now that the general commodity correction is out of the way and the froth has been worked out of the market: deflation in the strict sense of the term (monetary, not…

Do you remember the 1970 Academy Award-winning movie Patton, starring George C. Scott? In the beginning of the movie, Scott — playing the iconic American Gen. George S. Patton — stands in full dress uniform, backed up by a gigantic American…

In the typhoon of commentary that’s blown around the world a step behind the financial tsunami that’s wrecking everything, two little words have been curiously absent: “fraud” and “swindle.” But aren’t they really at the core of what…

“…It’s always darkest before it’s pitch black…” You might like to know, if you put store by such things, that the U.S. stock market just sank to a 14-year low against gold. With the Dow Jones index dipping below 9,000 last week,…

The charts are playing tricks. A bear trap in April stopped short of turning into an all-out bearish failure with a bull trap in July. In English, please? The bulls got suckered. Gold prices fell through their $850 May low now, which means that I…

A Texan customer who came to see me a few months ago told me a story which illustrates the fine mess we’re in. In the 1980s boom his neighborhood boasted not one but two commercial real-estate developers, both of whom were building shopping…

In the world of energy and scarcity, the name of the next president will matter to us quite a bit. “People are policy,” as Ronald Reagan used to say. But then again, a lot of energy and scarcity facts defy party labels. The energy resources are…

“Fear, Mr. Bond, takes gold out of circulation and hoards it against the evil day. In a period of history when every tomorrow may be the evil day, it is fair to say that a fat proportion of the gold dug out of one corner of the earth is at once…

It seems an odd quirk of history that Washington’s post-War obsession with its nationalized gold reserves — an obsession which Ian Fleming neatly tapped into with Goldfinger in 1959 — came so long after what historians call the “classical”…

Once upon a time money meant gold (and ever less silver), freely exchanged between private individuals looking to buy and sell, invest and spend. But then came the 20th century. It’s worth bearing in mind — now that the 20th century’s ended,…

In just the last couple of months, commodity stock prices have melted like ice cream on a hot summer day. I’ve been burning the phone line and firing off e-mail to people in the field about what they see. Over the years, I’ve developed quite a…

In February 1946, when they were both old men, Joseph Schumpeter wrote a letter to Irving Fisher explaining why he could not accept a plan on a proposed committee on monetary policy. He tried to soften his rejection by expressing his admiration for…

I just returned from New York City, where I had a unique perspective on the unfolding event of Hurricane Gustav. I spent Monday and Tuesday of this week as a guest in the studios of the Fox Business Network, at the corner of 47th Street West and…

Frank Holmes is the CEO of U.S. Global Investors, a money management firm honed in on the commodity bull market. I had dinner with him recently at the Blue Water Cafe in Vancouver. Over salmon and flying squid, as well as an excellent local ale, we…

One of the major energy facilities in the Gulf is the Louisiana Offshore Oil Port, or the LOOP. The LOOP is basically an oil terminal located at sea, south of Port Fourchon. The LOOP is designed to handle ultra-large oil tankers up to 750,000 tons…

It has been a brutal couple of months for commodities investors. Prices may have temporarily overshot fundamentals on the upside in June. But the opposite situation now exists. The commodity sector wipeout of the last two months has obliterated any…

In 1987, which is now more than twenty years ago, I published a book with James Dale Davidson. Some people still remember it for its title, Blood in the Streets, taken from a remark of Nathan Rothschild in 1815, at the time of Napoleon’s…

Damned if they do, damned if they don’t, politicians the world over are looking pretty sheepish right now. Nationalizing failed banks, mortgage lenders and insurance firms hardly makes for a strong election pitch. It won’t do much to…

Welcome to the most crucial period in American financial history. And the only persons who warned us about it first are the very same our government just took out of commission: the short seller. How’d they do it? Was it really an overnight blow?…

“Give me control of a nation’s money and I care not who makes her laws.” — Mayer Amschel Rothschild Let’s observe a moment of silence to mourn the slow demise of capitalism in the U.S. Our government is now overtly manipulating the stock…

There are an unusually large number of bears roaming our neighborhood this fall, and I am not talking about stocks or commodities. I know of two actual bear attacks since July — I guess that is not all that surprising in the Pacific Northwest.…

For about 10 years, Simon Jenkins and I were both writing columns for the London Times. Simon is still writing a column for The Sunday Times, but has shifted his weekly column to The Guardian. However, he has written something in The Sunday Times…

Why are precious metals moving upwards? After all, the market smashed them down all summer as the dollar strengthened. The short answer is that right now gold and silver are the only decent game in town. Yes, there are a few other asset and income…

We love this nugget of irony, idiocy or just plain hypocrisy so much, we have to repeat it — clutching our sides and doubling-up in laughter, tears streaming down our disbelieving faces: “The reality of the situation is that an open,…

Have you followed the recent rise in value of the U.S. dollar? Through late summer, the dollar increased in value against the euro, as well as the yen and numerous other currencies. Also, as August rolled on, gold fell from a price over $900 to…

It’s hard to over-egg the importance of Indian jewelry demand in the physical gold market. Between 2000 and 2007, gold jewelry sold in India accounted for one ounce-in-nine sold worldwide. One ounce in every five wound up as an Indian import (its…

The price of almost everything on the planet has been rising. And so has the inevitable talk of a commodities bubble and price manipulation. The discussion has become front and center in global markets around the world as economies reel under the…

Last year, I devoted several issues of my Strategic Investment service to the web of structured finance. I think it paid off. Since then, banks and brokerage stocks were punished. Energy and material stocks have soared-thanks to the Fed’s…

Yes, coal prices have continued to rise across the globe. But of course, this pales in comparison to the continued run-up in petroleum, which has virtually paralyzed the wallets of many oil-reliant Americans. The idea of a coal shortage is virtually…

I’ve spent the past week traveling across the Pacific Northwest and central Canada. I’ve been calling it my “2008 Energy & Geology Tour.” Within the past eight days, I’ve driven from Washington through Idaho and into Montana. Then I…

The Adventures of Tintin is a comic book series started back in 1929. My nine-year-old son loves it. I enjoy reading it along with him because the hero of the series, a young Belgian reporter named Tintin, often finds himself in interesting…

So Alan Greenspan — former chairman of the Federal Reserve — thinks this equals the Great Crash, if not out-bads it. “It’s getting increasingly evident that this is a once-in-a-century type of phenomenon,” he told the ever-fragrant Maria…

Some of the greatest economic shifts in history are associated with big political swings, if not with politicians by name. Think of Hooverism, Roosevelt’s New Deal, Reaganism or British Thatcherism. But those are just labels. Things are not as…

This deal is a must-own for your portfolio… But before I tell you what it is, I want to give you a sense of how big this really is: It’s exactly like being there for the birth of the offshore oil and gas industry. This industry, born of the…

When you have a lot of problems you also have a lot of opportunity. I want to start with some wise words from John Templeton. Templeton actually died a few weeks ago at the age of 95. His is a great story. Born and raised in rural Tennessee, Sir…

Cruising along at 30,000 feet, you peer out the window. Nothing to see here. Just limitless pale blue sky and the glare of the all-too-close sun hitting your eyes. The in-flight movie is silently playing out in front of you. You’d hoped to catch…

The American suburb was the greatest misallocation of resources in the history of the world… Why? Because it has no future, because we’re not going to be able to run it…. We don’t have the resource base to run it. A lot of the delusions that…

The sharp drop in world gold prices starting in late July knocked the cost of physical metal more than 20 percent off its record top of mid-March at last week’s low point. That level — just above $750 per ounce — also happens to sit right…

What’s going on with gold and oil? Here’s what we know. Prices for both gold and oil were moving upward for most of the spring and well into summer. Then prices hit a peak. Gold touched $980 per ounce. Oil topped $146 per barrel. Now prices are…

“You know, you saw subprime go first, and then, on a slight lag, you saw home equity, and now in the lag, you’re seeing prime go. And it’s exactly the same loss factors. But remember, the components of where we are in the states…[are] very…

The commodity bull market has a long way to go. This bull market is not magic. It’s not some crazy “cycle theory” I have. It does not fall out of the sky. It’s supply and demand. It’s simple stuff. In the 80s and 90s, when people were…

The media have dubbed it “the new age of epidemics.” From SARS to cancer, diabetes to the flu, we live in a world of increasingly powerful germs and diseases. Drug companies large and small have renewed their interest in one specific health care…

“All a man has to do to get rich in America is find out where people are going, get there first and buy land.” — Gen. Douglas MacArthur Bob Hope, the great American comedian and Hollywood star, was actually born in England. He once quipped,…

Oil is selling in the range of $113 per barrel, down from its recent high of $146. Gold is selling below $800 per ounce, down significantly from its springtime high of over $1,000. With a drop in excess of 20 percent for each item, it’s fair to…

Which way now for financial assets? Given what pumped them up, starting in late 2002, you’re better off asking which way for money itself. Less money would mean lower prices — the very opposite of what the world calls “inflation.” And if…

While in Vienna last month, I grabbed hold of the international edition of The Wall Street Journal. Over a classic Viennese breakfast of coffee, a boiled egg and pastry, I stumbled across an interview with Ted Forstmann, titled, “The Credit Crisis…

Western nations — the U.S., in particular — are now experiencing the bow wave of a profound change in the current and future availability of oil. According to recently published data, oil output from all major Western oil companies is on an…

About 7,050 feet above sea level, high in the snowy Sierra Nevada Mountains, lies a little frozen meadow called Gin Flat. It got its name from a speak-easy that closed long ago. Nestled amid a forest of pine and cedar, a little scientific outpost…

In March 1971, a Mexican fisherman named Rudesindo Cantarell appeared at the offices of the state-owned oil company Petróleos Mexicanos (Pemex) in southern Mexico. Cantarell had a complaint. He believed that Pemex had spilled oil near his favorite…

A few weeks ago we witnessed a political act of such unimaginable stupidity, it is hard to not choke at the mention of it. A cursory review of the details is worth a minute of your time. This compliments of The Oil & Gas…

Back in 1969 the International Monetary Fund (IMF) created a new kind of money — the ultimate form of international money, it believed — called the Special Drawing Right. You can’t shop with an SDR, nor trade it or even touch it. Unless you…

With the price of oil doubling in the past year, there are more fingers being pointed than solutions being offered. Unfortunately, one of the biggest “culprits” garnering much of the blame has been the oil speculators. Congress has decided to…

The downturn in the global economy is now 11 months old, if one takes the subprime crisis of August 2007 as the starting point. It has spread like the forest fires in California, establishing itself in one area after another, putting out tongues of…

World Made by Hand is a beautifully written novel about a very difficult time, post-Peak Oil. Some books hit you in the gut and force you to think; and this is one of them. You may go where you don’t want to go. But it’s quite a trip. The book…

What a difference a decade can make! Over the last 10 years of the 20th century, anyone buying and holding U.S. stocks made a total return approaching 18% per year. Their initial stake, as a 2002 research paper noted, increased five times over. Now…

World Made by Hand, Part II One of the Last Outposts The premise of World Made by Hand, James Kunstler’s new book, is apocalyptic. For a variety of reasons related to Peak Oil and economic collapse, American civilization simply broke down. The…

Ultra high-strength and super-light steels are the plastics of the 21st century. There is high demand for these steels for use in everything from jet engines to rail components. In turn, there is a big push for the quirky metals so critical in…

2008 has been an incredible year for commodities. While this drastic shift in focus to our finite global resources may seem immediate to the vast majority of Earth’s inhabitants, it’s actually been coming for a very long time. Many of us out…

There are two ways of studying economic theory. One approach is mathematical, and has been much enhanced by the computing power available to the individual economist. The other is historical and relies on the accumulated understanding of economic…

After 25 years of booming asset markets, it’s getting hard to keep hold of your money, let alone grow it. Inflation is destroying fixed-income bonds. Stocks have tipped into a bear market, down more than one-fifth worldwide. Real estate suffers…

Well another week of wild trading has left many on Wall Street bruised, battered and not sure what to think. Is the oil bubble bursting? Are commodities and resources heading lower? No one can say for sure, but this type of uncertainty causes a lot…

In investing, the prospect of crisis has always been a sort of summons for me. It’s like when I was a little boy and the ice cream truck’s jingle sent me running for loose change on a hot summer day. These days, I’m just trying to get at…

In the last year, the euro has decisively outperformed the dollar and the pound. Some commentators have argued that this means that the euro is the currency of the future, and that the dollar has been relegated to second place. However, there are…

Imagine a municipal bus that’s powered by an electric motor, crawling along the crowded streets of Beijing. What does this bus have in common with the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library, in Simi Valley, California? Or imagine offshore oil…

There is a map of the world on my office wall. What I like about this particular map is that the mapmaker paid particular attention to getting the scale right. That means Africa gets it proper gigantic sizing. It is truly a massive…

Investing in Exchange Traded Funds Investors around the country are looking for a safe way to invest their money while the market appears to be more volatile than ever. Interest rates are being cut, inflation is going up, and everyone’s money is…

Last week we saw a bounce in the stock market that threatened to send the price of gold down to the $920 mark. After a lightening advance celebrating the approval of the quasi-nationalization of America’s too-big-to-fail mortgage providers,…

Whiskey Plods Eastward ~ Again! HERE’S A QUICK photographic rundown of my recent trip to India. Sitting alone at my desk in dreary, chilly Baltimore, I often dream myself tramping around the crowded, filthy, sweltering streets of Mumbai. But…

Oil Exchange Traded Funds The world needs oil. It is how we get to work, go home, and maintain our way of life. Oil serves our transportation needs, yet it also serves as the standard-bearer for all energy prices. As any economics 101 student…

Peak Oil Report The Theory of Declining World Oil Supplies By Jamie Ellis, Whiskey & Gunpowder Peak Oil: An Overview The subject of Peak Oil has gained a lot of popularity in recent years. Just a simple LexisNexis search on the topic yields…

Peak Oil: Defend Yourself and Profit from the Coming Crude Awakening A few years back, Whiskey & Gunpowder was one of the few voices predicting a surge in oil prices. Despite analysts’ Pollyanna views, we knew things weren’t what they…

Whiskey & Gunpowder Special Report: Gold Bull Market Make Way for China Gold Buying Frenzy “The beginning of gold trading by individual investors on the Shanghai Gold Exchange (SGE) later this month is expected to provide a welcome…

A Whiskey & Gunpowder Special Report: Energy Infrastructure”A Pipe Dream Come True: Spectra Energy Corp.” By Byron King, Editor – Outstanding Investments and Whiskey and Gunpowder I like to begin at the beginning, so let’s…

A Whiskey & Gunpowder Special Report: Why Ethanol Cannot Live Up to all the “Perfect” Energy-Solution Hype by Byron King, Editor Outstanding Investments and Whiskey and Gunpowder EXPOSED: Leading Investment Expert Reveals This Is NOT the…

Whiskey & Gunpowder Special Report: Geothermal Energy A Heat-Seeking Energy Investment What is it about an energy source that makes it useful, let alone valuable? Ask yourself, for example, what is coal? Why is coal useful? It is, as the old…

Geothermal Energy: An Investment In the Future Whiskey and Gunpowder Geothermal Energy Report Geothermal Energy We have found the company that is ready to lead the way on this exciting new energy technology. The company is one of the world’s…

Gold Carry Trade Special Report: The Real Story Behind the True Gold Bull Market On July 24, 1998, Alan Greenspan stood before the House Committee on Banking and Financial Services and said, “Central banks stand ready to lease gold in increasing…

A Whiskey & Gunpowder Special Report: Oil and Gas Infrastructure: How to Profit From the Pipeline By Byron King, Editor – Outstanding Investments and Whiskey and Gunpowder I have returned home from my trip to Alaska, and now there is more…

Silver Report Silver Report -An Overview In the case of silver, during the long bear market from 1980 to 2003, when silver traded mostly in the $3.50-$5 per ounce range, there were no major, public, pure silver mining companies that generated free…

Investing in Timber Financial panics have a way of unsettling the nerves. You seek refuge in things you can trust. Assets you can see and watch over. And sometimes those assets hold their own secrets, which are unveiled only after the passage of a…

Whiskey & Gunpowder Special Report: Uranium Market A “Yellowcake” ETF On July 24, Westinghouse Electric signed a deal to build four nuclear reactors in eastern China. The price tag on the deal is $8 billion. This is just one tiny piece of…

Whiskey & Gunpowder Special Report: Wind Energy Wind Profits Are Blowing IN Wind Energy Renewable energy has taken center stage across the globe.  The media has jumped on solar and hydroelectric power.  Even geothermal is starting to grab…

On the energy front, we’ve seen several days of declining prices. Oil has led the way, falling from about $146 to $121. Coal and natural gas sold down, as well, as did many energy companies and service firms. So we’ve seen quite a tumble, led by…

It’s hard to be away from Whiskey. So many things I want to talk about have come to the fore in just the two short months since my last essay. The Supreme Court decision on the DC gun ban. The Chinese pollution debacle that’s becoming more…

Gold may be even more precious than we think. During the last several years, mining companies around the globe have discovered almost no new large-scale gold deposits. So if the world’s major gold companies can’t find any new gold deposits in…

China is the new Germany. At the end of the Second World War, Germany was an “emerging market.” It was industrializing rapidly and producing brisk economic growth. Today, Germany is a mature “developed market” that grows slowly if it grows…

“Ever wondered why your family budgets never seem to work out as planned?” asked Harry Browne in his 1970 bestseller How You Can Profit from the Coming Devaluation. The book sold more than 100,000 copies in hardback. Some three decades later, a…

If you didn’t invest in this nuclear equipment provider (NEP) company on March 31, you missed out. Within minutes of the latest news, shares for this NEP started rising, and currently, they are sitting 25 percent above their March 31 price. Too…

The world keeps turning and the resources get used up. It’s really quite simple. Despite that fact, the debates rage over Peak Oil, Peak Food and peak everything else. It’s about as sensible as rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic. So the…

Cats, the great humorist P.G. Wodehouse once wrote, are snooty because they cannot get over the fact that the ancient Egyptians once worshipped them as gods. Americans, like cats, might also struggle to get used to a changed world. The global…

You don’t have to have an awful lot of gray hair to remember the excitement around England’s massive North Sea oil fields. While discovered in 1969, it wasn’t until well into the 1980s, on the back of surging oil prices, that the fields came…

The world of Round Hill consists of two distinct countries with two distinct economies separated by one gigantic ocean. The sun rises on the Independent Republic of Hamlin in the east and sets on the Democratic Nation of Stuart in the west. For more…

Economic theory tries to deal with a limited number of factors and the mechanisms by which they interact. The main factors are population, food, energy, property, and manufactures, all of which are physical realities capable of being counted. They…

When the stock market turns ugly, the quest for “non-correlated assets” intensifies. A non-correlated asset is fancy Wall Street talk for something that doesn’t move lock-step with the overall market. When the market falls, a non-correlated…

Oil has become the “anti-dollar” of modern times. Oil is now serving as the source of global monetary discipline that gold used to perform. Oil is the energy life-blood of all modern economies. So when a nation debauches its currency, the oil…

Corn ethanol does nothing but bring the bushel price to an all-time high, vaguely put a dent into our energy demand, pollute lands with pesticides and drink up a limited water supply… Bottom line is, corn is a food, not a fuel. Well there’s a…

Last week, amid a stream of bearish economic news, the chairman of the Federal Reserve, Ben Bernanke, asserted his priority on price stability and uttered the word “dollar,” as if turning a new leaf. He did that to get your attention. Fed chairs…

What you make of the gold market right now depends on what you make of the kind of data UBS’s precious metals team follows. Big institutional players in the New York futures market slashed their bullish betting on gold in the week of June 10. Data…

I received an e-mail from a Washington, D.C. advocacy group urging me to urge my U.S. Senators to “support the Climate Security Act.” Climate security? This is legislation to set up emissions trading or a “Cap & Trade” system for…

Most of us Americans are so accustomed to a world of plenty; we have a hard time imagining a world of scarcity — much less making investments based upon this idea. But the energy markets provide a very powerful example of what happens when…

For a useful way to think about energy exports and prices, Dallas based geologist Jeffrey Brown points to the current situation with global rice supplies. Brown among others worked on the Export Land Model (ELM), a model that reflects the decline in…

I know what is going on inside the heads of the farmers. This spring, I went to visit farms in the Midwest, as I do every year. It was a Saturday in mid-April when I pulled up to the Miller Armstrong Building in the sleepy farm town of Waseca, Minn.…

Precious metals have taken the back seat in the recent rally in commodities. While corn, soybeans, oil and other commodities were making either fresh contracts or all-time highs on a daily basis, precious metals simply consolidated. This was to be…

A catastrophe for Iowa farmers will not be just a catastrophe for Midwestern Americans. In the Iowa floods, we’ll see more evidence of how the problems of weird weather (climate change) combine and ramify the problems associated with Peak Oil. In…

It’s hard to be bullish on gold when there’s so much bad news in the world. After all, gold offers a refuge against bad times ahead. Like all good insurance, it’s best bought before trouble arrives — not during or after. And just how much…

Markets exaggerate in both directions. They create bubbles of overvaluation when expectations are high; they create troughs of undervaluation when expectations are low. At the present time, there is a struggle between optimism and pessimism, in…

The “next big thing” our friends at The Daily Reckoning recently predicted, “will be downsizing, cutting back, making do. Barely on the radar screen now, thrift is coming into focus more clearly day by day. So far, people are a bit embarrassed…

During tough times, many people are hit hard. We often hear about industries and sectors that are “recession proof.” These are areas of the economy that cannot be negatively affected by a recession for a variety of reasons. Either they exist in…

It seems that every time you pick up the paper or switch on the TV, someone is talking about a new way to make his car run on biodiesel or ethanol: “I converted my car to run on old McDonald’s french fry oil, and the mileage is pretty darn…