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Neo-liberal??? that is just political crap used to brain wash you. The model is the model... the person that implements it make it successful or failure. Just because it is "not Neo-Liberal" it does not mean it is good or bad. Correa's populist strategy it to spend the money that he does not have to make people happy. It will last a year or two, but now the nation belongs to China, Ecuador is paying China's credit with Oil that haven't been extracted yet (we pawned the oil), Ecuador gave half of his gold resources to Goldman Sachs (we pawned the gold). Is that a sign of good economy?

HA HA HA !!! you seem to be a)Outside Ecuador or b)Brainwashed by the Ecuadorians government propaganda. Ecuador pawns half its gold reserves with Goldman Sachs

See: http://www.marketoracle.co.uk/Article14996.html http://viewzone2.com/fakegoldx.html http://gold-quote.net/en/articles/fake-tungsten-gold-bars.php http://news.coinupdate.com/largest-private-refinery-discovers-gold-plated-tungsten-bar-0171/ http://www.gata.org/node/8390 Some people are suggesting that the businesses offering cash for gold jewellery are doing so because there is less likelihood that they will be deceived than they would be if buying bullion. Also, in related news: http://bbs.chinadaily.com.cn/viewthread.php?tid=658195 http://dailypaul.com/99841/where-is-our-gold-that-is-missing-from-fort-knox http://www.wnd.com/?pageId=45782 BTW, I couldn't find any of this referred to on any mainstream site, so I leave it to others to determine if this is rumour or not.

They are manipulating it - there are plenty documents available where they come right out and state it for the public record. Don't take my word though, as these folks have compiled a huge body of evidence:

http://www.gata.org/

It's so easy to understand. Low credit and the push for home ownership at any cost led to insane price increases and speculation that it wasn't hard to see had to come to a crash stop. I had this figured out as of 2004 when I talked to a realtor who told me I needed to buy NOW with nothing down and use the guaranteed 2%/month price increase to refinance in a year. I can recognize a bubble when I see it.

That's why it pisses me off when Greenspan points the fingers elsewhere. He's the one who set the rates. He's the one who jacked them up, then down, waiting too long and overcorrecting to account for it. And he refuses to take the blame.

Low rates do not, themselves, motivate banks to write bad paper on behalf of the risky blokes who suddenly think they can afford a house. Banks were pushed. Banks were even sued to extend home ownership to those who, frankly, can't handle it.

Low rates accellerated the process, but cannot indepedently cause this problem. You almost said it yourself in your first sentence, before tripping over your own politics and blaming Greenspan.

Greenspan did oppose CDO regulation, an error which he has since admitted. But the unregulated state of CDOs also could not cause the crisis. CDOs arose to collect the bad mortgages, and the ratings agencies performed whatever evil was necessary to keep the music playing. Whether they too were strongarmed, or simply cashing in on banks' willingness to pay annual "maintenance fees" for AAA ratings, is not yet known.

While it's true that current prices put gold at around 3.5-4 trillion, if it reaches the inflation-adjusted high of the 80s gold would be closer to $2000 per troy ounce putting total gold value at 7.6 trillion. There is much reason to think it will reach this level: falling gold levels in Western Central Banks after years and years of liquidation and artificially suppressed prices (see GATA), increased demand for physical gold (esp. in the Middle East where they wouldn't know/care what an ETF was if it hit them in the face), inflation concerns, imminent currency and credit collapse, possible dollar hedging with gold by Asian and Russian Central Banks, etc, etc

I always encourage people to check out http://www.gata.org/ and do a little reading. They have put together an impressive amount of investigation into the alleged gold and silver price manipulation. I wouldn't recommend putting all of your eggs in the precious metal basket, but it is sensible to put at least some of your portfolio there as an inflation hedge. Just make sure you get the serial numbers of the bars you own, or better yet take physical delivery! Paper is a promise only!

I am not a licensed financial planner in any state or country. Anyone taking investment advice from slashdot is a moron anyway. DYODD.

From your reply, I can see we're not going to agree -- yet.

Have you read Rothbard's (free e-)book I linked to? Here is another link. It's a simple book, you can read it in one sitting.

Have you read Cheuvreux's report I linked to? Here is another link. It isn't quite as simple, but it offers great insight for an investment house that realizes how much collusion has been involved in the markets -- stock, currency, housing and consumer.

You may feel wealthier than the previous generation, but you aren't. The previous generation owned 70% of their homes by the age of 35, our average homeowner at 35 owns less than 10% -- and with house prices as inflated as they are, that number might actually be negative ownership. The previous generation would put their gold-backed currency in the bank to keep it safe, but they also allowed the bank to loan out a portion of that gold at a nice interest rate to people with real business plans and real plans to pay the bank back. Today, debt is based on nothing, so there is no real reason to pay it back over time (this is why bankruptcies are so high and consumer debt is out of control).

Both the links I provided offer a very strong argument for returning to a free market currency. Let Chase offer gold-backed dollars (100% reserve), let Citibank offer silver-backed dollars, let First Bank of Kansas offer corn-backed dollars. In the end, the market will decide what is the best medium of exchange.

Gold is rising very quickly now, yes, but over the long term it is a very unwise investment.

Or has it? Your mutual funds have tracked higher due to inflationary manipulations of the money base -- the government prints new money, you get it, you put it into stocks, but so does everyone else who gets the new money, so the stocks (and housing and consumer goods and other stuff) goes up in price. Because gold had "crashed" in the 80s, people avoided it, so the price was depressed. In the 80s and on, the central banking cartels had manipulated the gold prices by leasing gold out of the reserves, in order to keep the gold price down and mask their inflationary manipulations. For 4 years people called me a kook, but Cheureux's report confirms what I've been saying: gold is too cheap right now and has a lot of room to blow up as the currencies fall.

If you're smart, you'd take advantage of your profits in the manipulated stock market and get out. What goes up through coercion always come down, what goes up because of market creation tends to stay up until someone else finds a new way to copy it. Currency can be copied, infinitely. Gold can only be mined. Which will be around in 5 years? 50 years? 500 years?

I've gone out on a limb and said that the stock market has about 85% overinflated value to lose. I believe that gold is depreciated somewhere between 85% and 850% -- I think that gold could see a jump to US$682 in the next 12-18 months, but it could go as high as US$5000 if things were REALLY bad. I doubt the latter figure, but I believe the real number will fall in between the two. Cheuvreux is the first huge investment house to say that US$2000 figure is reasonable.

Where will mutual funds be then? Where will the housing market be?

I've been watching Wilkerson's speeches and interviews and opinions since early 2005. He's been one of the highest ranking officials to speak about the cabal that is in control of the White House now, but he also has inferred that the cabal has been in power for longer than the currency administration has been. For those who are anti-Bush, do not believe the Clinton was not part of the power party, either.

I strongly believe that the true case for war was to keep the petrodollar in power. I also believe that almost every war and military action we've been involved in since 1913 has been primarily for control of the global currency base, not for oil or trade or communism or any of the usual suspects.

Iran's current oil bourse theories came along just before the power party started beating the war drums against Iraq. I posted today the link to the Cheuvreux Report that reconfirms my crazy tinfoil hat theories about the control of the dollar, and this time from a huge international investment bank. War is the health of the State, said Randolph Bourne. For millenia, war was always about directly controlling others. Yet in the recent centuries, war has been about controlling others indirectly -- by controlling the means of barter between people.

No matter what Bush or Rice or Clinton or Nixon or Kennedy have said, hindsight lets us see what they were really about -- making sure that their peers and families and cronies were at the front of the welfare lines when our Federal Reserve was handing out newly printed paper dollars. To believe anything else is to continue to be a pawn to the system.

Please explain, dada21, where lies the conspiracy?

If you go to my website I list the M3 money supply figure as reported by the Fed. This figure shows the true inflation of the dollar and is reflected in many consumer goods price increases since 1913. Yet in recent times, I do believe that the central banks have been hiding inflation by manipulating their gold reserves through leases, swaps and call options. Instead of feeling the true hit of 20% inflation, we're seeing gentle 3-5% inflation because the price of gold has been kept low through the various manipulations. The Cheuvreux report (PDF warning) came out the other day, and it is the first international brokerage company to actually validate what I've been saying for 4 years.

If you're familiar with my Rothbard link and the Cheuvreaux Report, you'll be really worried for the near and long term future of this country. The dollar's manipulations are finally coming to the surface, and much of our empire's growth in the past 50 years can be tied to holding on to hiding the manipulations. I hate the tinfoil hat side of my beliefs, though, but it is so hard to find where I've been wrong -- every day I read more and more confirmations of what was once considered "crazy."