All was calm in Far East trading on Friday morning. Both metals began to slip a little starting at 3:00 p.m. on Friday afternoon in Hong Kong. This lasted through London trading as well…and by the time the Comex opened, gold was down $10 and silver had slid about 23 cents. But once trading started in New York, both gold and silver rallied strongly…but it should be noted that gold ‘ran out of gas’ just before $940 once again. However, silver did better…adding a bit over 30 cents before it, too, ran into ‘resistance’…but managed to close almost on its high of the day.

There wasn’t big volume yesterday, so not too much should be read into this action…but it’s always noteworthy so see that parabolic rises in prices are never allowed to get too far out of hand before the usual ‘not for profit’ sellers show up.

Despite the fact that

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The American dream is drowning in debt, says Andrew Gordon. The middle class are being squeezed as tumbling asset prices hack away at household wealth. And things won’t change unless the government steps up to the plate.

More from Andrew at Investor’s Daily Edge:

We’re in a “damned if we do, damned if we don’t” economy. And there’s not a damn thing we can do about it.

Our economy floats on the whims of the American consumer. When they feel confident about the future, they spend. The more they spend, the better the economy does. This is oddly true even if 80 percent of the spending is on goods from Asia.

Right now the American consumer isn’t feeling so confident and the economy is suffering as a result.

But if we spend more, we go more into debt. We’re already spending more than we make. And the

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When the president of the United States visited this region almost a year ago, the city of Dubai closed down for the entire day. Locals and expats alike jokingly refer to this event of yore as “Bush Day,” a day when they stayed home from work and watched movies as the leader of the “free world” took a Big Bus tour of the city.

Now, twelve months later, as W’s presidential twilight years draw to a close, another of the West’s leaders journeys to the Gulf region. Like Bush, England’s Gordon Brown is not particularly popular in the polls. But this captain from the west has more pressing issues to deal with than the restoration of his public image; he needs cash to rescue the world’s “emerged” nations from the brink of financial collapse. And so, hot on the trail of the dollars and pounds that have poured from the west

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THE PRICE OF SPOT GOLD bounced 1.6% from an overnight low of $860 on Wednesday, steadying at $876 an ounce as Western stock markets ticked higher despite a raft of miserable Eurozone data. Crude oil rose back above $100 per barrel, while long-dated government bonds continued to rise in price, pushing yields still further below the rate of inflation. The Dollar slipped from two-week highs on the currency markets. "European economic woes should sustain the greenback's safe-haven appeal today," believes Manqoba Madinane at Standard Bank in Johannesburg , "despite downside correction warnings from technical momentum indicators, and this could impact precious metals. "Several other warnings of downside risk for precious metals have emerged," he adds, noting that CDX investment grade credit spreads have narrowed, "indicating receding financial market system risk." Tuesday saw inter-bank lending rates leap yet again, however, with the cost of raising ...

The last two weeks have been the most shocking in my time reporting on global financial markets. I started working for Reuters as a financial markets reporter back in 1992 in Wellington. In the following 14 years I  covered markets, companies and economics in Wellington, Canberra, Sydney, London and Singapore. I was up to my elbows in massive bank takeovers, market booms, dotcom busts and the aftermath of 9/11 when I worked in London for Reuters and FTMarketWatch from early 1999 to mid 2003. I had thought that was as wild as you could get. In Singapore I edited coverage of the SARS crisis throughout Asia and amazing rise of China’s economy and companies. I couldn’t imagine much bigger events or more amazing changes on markets. How wrong I was. These last two weeks make all those things look like mere blips and flurries. Could anyone have imagined two weeks ago that;

The US Treasury and ...

My house in London is close to the cemetery where Karl Marx is buried, and how he must be chuckling in his grave at what is now clearly the greatest crisis for the Anglo-Saxon model of financial capitalism in a generation. His famous dictum ‘A capitalist will sell you the rope to hang him with’ certainly applies to the reckless mispricing of risk in financial markets in recent years driven by the excesses of securitisation, a classic case of individually rational profit maximising behaviour creating destructive systemic stress. This was exacerbated by the perception that bankers could rely on the ‘Greenspan Put’, that central banks would always support the banking system on the downside but never constrain it on the upside. When the dust settles, US politicians and regulators need to focus on the ethics and social impact of radical financial innovation as much as …