Gold Fever — to $1,300 an Ounce

Sorry I didn’t post anything yesterday. I was very busy.  I’m researching my new gold report. You can read more about it here: http://www.uncommonwisdomdaily.com/dollar%e2%80%99s-last-hurrah-hands-you-golden-opportunity/

Subscribers to Red-Hot Global Small-Caps and Red-Hot Commodity ETFs will get the report as my way of saying “thank you” for sticking with me.  For everyone else, I’m offering a bargain, pre-publication price.

In other news, I got a nice quote at the end of this piece for the Huffington Post:  “Oil Industry Cranks Up Lobbying Efforts.”  I believe it was originally written for the LA Times, but I can’t be sure.  I’ve been interviewed a lot lately.  Everyone wants to know why oil is going up (or down, depending on the day).  “Look at the dollar,” I say.  “Oil is the anti-dollar.”

That always seems to disappoint them. I think they’re hoping for some diabolical scheme, maybe a giant oil monster controlled by a mad scientist or something.

Meanwhile, the FDIC’s Sheila Blair says that “Too big to fail must end.”  Really?  Maybe she should talk to President Obama about that.  His administration has been working furiously to prop up “too big to fail” institutions, not break them up, as I explained in my “Giant Stone Head Economics” mini-report.  For more that is wrong with Obama’s plan for regulatory reform, read this.

Paul Krugman says the kind of solution I’m talking about is nostalgia for a “golden age that never was.”  I say he’s blinded by the reflection off his ivory tower.  I wonder who’s right?

Calculated Risk passes along a report from the EIA showing that miles driven increased in April compared to a year earlier.  On the other hand, gasoline prices have risen sharply since April, so we’ll see what the June numbers bring when they come out in two months. 

To put April’s number in perspective, Calculated Risk looks at the annual change in the rolling 12 month average of U.S. vehicles miles driven.

It’s not that encouraging, but we’ll see.  Larry Kudlow’s “Green Shoots” and all that.

You may think I’m ticked off at President Obama today (and maybe that’s true, to an extent), but it irks me that he is compared to Franklin Delano Roosevelt while showing none of the courage of FDR.  Ken Silverstein instead compares Obama to Hoover: 

“To understand how dire our situation is now it is necessary to remember that when he was elected president in 1928, Herbert Hoover was widely considered the most capable public figure in the country. Hoover-like Obama-was almost certainly someone gifted with more intelligence, a better education, and a greater range of life experience than FDR. And Hoover, through the first three years of the Depression, was also the man who comprehended better than anyone else what was happening and what needed to be done. And yet he failed.

“It is impossible not to wish desperately for his success as he tries to grapple with all that confronts him: a worldwide depression, catastrophic climate change, an unjust and inadequate health-care system, wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, the ongoing disgrace of Guantanamo, a floundering education system. Obama’s failure would be unthinkable. And yet the best indications now are that he will fail, because he will be unable-indeed he will refuse-to seize the radical moment at hand.

“Every instinct the president has honed, every voice he hears in Washington, every inclination of our political culture urges incrementalism, urges deliberation, if any significant change is to be brought about. The trouble is that we are at one of those rare moments in history when the radical becomes pragmatic, when deliberation and compromise foster disaster. The question is not what can be done but what must be done.”

Is Silverstein correct?  You tell me.

As the New York Times’ Joe Nocera writes:

“>‘On Wednesday, President Obama unveiled what he described as “a sweeping overhaul of the financial regulatory system, a transformation on a scale not seen since the reforms that followed the Great Depression.” In terms of the sheer number of proposals, outlined in an 88-page document the administration released on Tuesday, that is undoubtedly true. But in terms of the scope and breadth of the Obama plan - and more important, in terms of its overall effect on Wall Street’s modus operandi - it’s not even close to what Roosevelt accomplished during the Great Depression.’

Here’s another comparison to the Great Depression (and how to avoid the worst of it.

Is there going to be another investment bubble? Well, since the Good-Time Charlies in Washington are doing nothing meaningful to change the system that produced previous bubbles, I don’t doubt it for a minute.

I apologize for sounding so dour.  Here, as is the tradition at the Red Hot Energy and Gold blog, is a groovin’ utterly-devoid-of-higher meaning music video to take you into the weekend …

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