Pandora’s Box of rate hikes is opened! Is the dollar being removed from oil trades? Deficits do matter, eh? Gold heads toward its all-time high…And Now… Today’s Pfennig!

Good day… And a Terrific Tuesday to you! A Tuesday morning that is seeing a HUGE currency rally VS the dollar on the news that the Reserve Bank of Australia (RBA) opted to go ahead and hike rates now, and not wait for November’s meeting,

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“It’s only gas,” said the geologists. And wow, were they ever frustrated…  The year was 1959. The geologists were in the Netherlands, near a small town named Groningen, at the southern edge of the North Sea. They worked for Shell and Esso (now Exxon Mobil) and were drilling a well. Instead of oil, however, the drill bored into a massive deposit of natural gas. All that hard work and expense for a disappointing find of natural gas.

But the politicians of Europe weren’t so disappointed. They soon sat up and took notice, because…

With further drilling near Groningen, it became clear that the Dutch gas field was gigantic. We now know that in its early days, the Groningen field was the largest gas field in Europe. In fact, it was one of the largest gas fields ever discovered anywhere in the world, holding over 100 trillion cubic feet of natural gas.

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The EPA recently ruled that too much carbon dioxide is threatening the planet. What this does is make it a lot easier to regulate and tax emitters of this gas.

So here we are in a shaky economy tottering on a ledge and along comes the EPA ready to shove it right off. As The Wall Street Journal reported: “The landmark decision lays the groundwork for federal efforts to cap carbon emissions - at a potential cost of billions of dollars to businesses and government.”

In other words, the war on the so-called greenhouse gases is officially under way - and it is going to be expensive. Each passing month brings us closer to capping, taxing or cutting the gases thought to cause global warming.

I don’t think investors appreciate how far-reaching such efforts could be. And there will be definite winners and losers as a result. Some of these are far from

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Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae are to America’s great empire what the East India Company was to the British Empire in the 19th century…and the Louisiana Company was to France in the 18th. Huge, stupid, and probably fatal.

Freddie and Fannie are huge government-chartered mortgage lenders. In 18th century France, speculators bet on the riches of Louisiana, through the government-chartered Louisiana Company. In the 19th century, they wagered their money on the riches of India, through the government-chartered Eastn India Company. And in the 20th century, they gambled on rising housing prices through Fannie and Freddie.

The immediate problem is that the mortgage lenders are running out of money. They need to raise $75 billion. A few years ago, that would have been no problem.

Everybody was ready to put money into America’s go-go, securitized housing market. But then, housing went.

Yesterday’s news tells us that housing prices are falling in 23 out of

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Senate rejects auto bailout…  ECB pushes back from the rate cut table…  Goldman and Citigroup predict a dollar fall…  China to continue to appreciate… And Now… Today’s Pfennig!

Good day… Not sure when all of you will be receiving this today, as it took nearly over a half hour for my computer to boot up this morning. But its all good news for currency investors, so I’ll get it written and out to you as quickly as I can. The dollar slowed its decent overnight, but continued to fall vs. most of the major currencies as the US Senate rejected the $14 billion bailout for the auto industry.

The big winner in the Senate rejection of the bailout plan was the Japanese yen,

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