In normal recessions, commodities prices fall - and stay down for the count - as mines, farms and oil wells continue to expand production, even as demand is flattened by the economic malaise. Well, not this time around. And that figures to make commodities a profitable defensive investment. Indeed, we’ve uncovered four of the very best ways to profit from this trend. Let me explain. The Journal of Commerce commodities price index leaped 9.5% in May, the largest one-month gain since the index was first compiled back in 1985. Oil prices, which bottomed in the $30-a-barrel range, are pushing once again towards $70 a barrel - not the all-time record of $147 touched last year, but still very high on a historical basis. And gold is trading at roughly $980, close to its all-time peak and extremely high by historical standards. So what’s going ...

[Editor's Note:When the journalistic sleuths at Slate magazine recently set out to identify the stock-market guru who correctly predicted how far U.S. stocks would fall because of the global financial crisis, the respected "e-zine" concluded it was Martin Hutchinson who "called" the market bottom.

That discovery was no surprise to the readers of Money Morning - after all, Hutchinson has made a bevy of such savvy predictions since this publication was launched. Hutchinson warned investors about the evils of credit default swaps six months before the complex derivatives KO'd insurer American International Group Inc. He predicted the record run that gold made last year - back in 2007. Then, last fall - as Slate discovered - Hutchinson "called" the market bottom.

Now investors face an unpredictable stock market that's back-dropped by an uncertain economy. No matter. Hutchinson has developed a strategy that's tailor-made for such a directionless market, and that ...

The Dow has been on a mini-roll. Therefore, most investors are thrilled to see battered stock portfolios recover even a smidgen of their massive losses. The problem is that these investors aren’t paying attention to what’s happening elsewhere around the globe. And they may be missing out on the opportunity of the decade! That’s because the morsels of good economic news coming out of the U.S. are completely overshadowing what’s happening in Asia. China: A Bright Spot in the Region And the Global Economy Just last week, a new report from the World Bank painted a very pretty picture about the economies of China, the world’s third-biggest economy, and its Asian neighbors …...

My son, Kenji, was only three years old when I took him to Disneyland. And his favorite two rides were Dumbo the Flying Elephant and It’s a Small World. I swear, I had to listen to my son sing It’s a Small, Small World a couple hundred times over the next week. Walt Disney was a visionary in many ways. And he really nailed the concept of a shrinking world. But while he may have been thinking about a shrinking world in social terms, the global economy has been shrinking at a pace that even Disney couldn’t have foreseen. The World has become One Interdependent Global Economy The Group of Twenty industrial countries (G-20), which met last week in London, were responsible for 85 percent of the global gross domestic product....