This post provides links to a number of interesting articles I have read over the past few days that you may also enjoy.

• Ambrose Evans-Pritchard (Telegraph): Is $6,300 fair value for gold? November 19, 2009. The last parabolic spike in gold took off when central banks joined the fray in the 1970s, hoarding bullion with the same enthusiasm as gold bugs. Dylan Grice from Société Générale says it smells much the same today. He sees an eerie similarity between the decision of India’s central bank to buy half the IMF’s entire sale of gold, and the move by France’s central bank to start converting dollars into gold in 1965.

• Gregory Zuckerman (The Wall Street Journal): John Paulson making big new bet on gold, November 19, 2009. John Paulson, who scored about $20 billion of profits between 2007 and early

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This post provides links to a number of interesting articles I have read over the past few days that you may also enjoy.

• OUPblog: Oxford Word of the Year 2009: Unfriend, November 16, 2009. Every year the New Oxford American Dictionary prepares for the holidays by making its biggest announcement of the year.  This announcement is usually applauded by some and derided by others and the ongoing conversation it sparks is always a lot of fun, so I encourage you to let us know what you think in the comments.

Without further ado, the 2009 Word of the Year is: “unfriend”. “Unfriend” - verb - to remove someone as a “friend” on a social networking site such as Facebook.

• Martin Wolf (Financial Times): Grim truths Obama should have told Hu, November 17, 2009. Obama

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This post provides links to a number of interesting articles I have read over the past few days that you may also enjoy.

• John Arlidge: (Times Online): I’m doing “God’s work”. Meet Mr Goldman Sachs, November 8, 2009. The Sunday Times gains unprecedented access to the world’s most powerful, and most secretive, investment bank.

• Martha White (The Big Money): The Dow is too high, November 9 2009. What’s holding up the stock market? (It’s not the economy.)

• Rob Smyth, Bill Ryder and Ken Liu (Riverfront): Ten conditions for a sustainable recovery, November 9, 2009.

• The New York Times: Jobless recovery, November 7, 2009. We know that more stimulus spending and government programs are a fraught topic. But they are exactly what the country needs. It may be the only way to prevent a

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This post provides links to a number of interesting articles I have read over the past few days that you may also enjoy.

• Michael Kahn (Barron’s): Setting free the bears, November 2, 2009. The stock market’s astounding run from its March lows has finally run into a real ceiling. After outpacing most, if not all, post bear-market rallies over the past century the inevitable is finally here. But is it part of another correction or something more? The urgency of the sell-off suggests the latter. That said, I don’t see the danger of the market testing its March lows any time soon.

• Charles Githler (MoneyShow.com): Former bears’ take on the market’s future, October 18, 2009. Are we headed for a major correction, or even worse: a resumption of the bear market?What “the best” (former bears) are telling us now …

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Niall Ferguson, Professor of History at Harvard University and author of the brilliant “The Ascent of Money“, is interviewed by Martin Wolf, the FT’s chief economics commentator, at the FT View from the Top conference on the future of capitalism.

Click here or on the image below to view the video clip.

Source: Niall Ferguson, Financial Times, October 29, 2009.

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This post provides links to a number of interesting articles I have read over the past few days that you may also enjoy.

• Joseph Stiglitz (The National Interest): Death cometh for the greenback, October 27, 2009. Whichever path we take, like it or not, we will be moving away from current arrangements, the dollar-reserve system. There are only two questions: will the movement away be orderly or disorderly, and will America play a part in shaping the new system that will emerge?

• Doug Kass (TheStreet.com): Earnings likely to trend lower, October 27, 2009. Underpromising and overdelivering is the oldest game in the investor relations handbook, as earnings expectations are often cagily crafted by corporate managements. In turn, many Wall Street analysts, emulating Ralph Wanger’s zebras, follow that company guidance in adopting a herd mentality that morphs into a Wall

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This post provides links to a number of interesting articles I have read over the past few days that you may also enjoy.

• Gillian Tett (Financial Times): Rally fuelled by cheap money brings a sense of foreboding, October 22, 2009. It is crystal clear that the longer that money remains ultra cheap, the more traders will have an incentive to gamble (particularly if they privately suspect that today’s boom will be short-lived and want to score big over the next year). Somehow all this feels horribly familiar; I just hope that my sense of foreboding turns out to be wrong.

• Doug Kass (TheStreet.com): The earnings season racket, October 21, 2009. If end demand doesn’t pick up (and pick up quickly), the 2010 earnings outlook for many industries (such as semiconductors and other beneficiaries of restocking) will be in jeopardy, as

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This post provides links to a number of interesting articles I have read over the past few days that you may also enjoy.

• Doug Kass (TheStreet.com): A force in motion, October 20, 2009. Arguably, the market has begun to decouple from fundamentals; instead, liquidity has overcome almost any other influence as every little setback has been countered with an avalanche of buying. It has fed upon itself, and it has contained corrections as many money managers play catch-up and chase strength.

• Dan Holland (RealClearMarkets): An interview with Jason Trennert, Ocober 20, 2009. Jason Trennert is the chief investment strategist at Strategas Research Partners, a Manhattan-based advisor to institutional investors, which he co-founded three years ago. Institutional Investor magazine has consistently ranked Trennert one of the top strategists on Wall Street.

• Martin Wolf (Financial Times): How to manage

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I thought it of interest to see what surveys of forecasters indicate about two questions being asked: Is a dollar collapse imminent -- Martin Wolf is skeptical, while others [0] are convinced the end is nigh -- and is a double dip recession likely? I take a look at the messages conveyed by FX4casts.com and the WSJ October survey of forecasters.

The Dollar

First, let's take a look at what a survey of approximately 50 banks and financial firms indicates, for the value of the dollar (Fed broad index) and the euro/dollar exchange rate.

Figure 1: Log dollar index (broad) (blue), mean forecast (red squares), high and low forecasts (95% bounds) (teal +). Forecast dates typically pertain to 4th Thursday in each month. NBER defined recessions shaded gray, assumes last recession ends 09Q2. Source: Federal Reserve via St. Louis Fed FRED II, FX4casts.com, NBER, ...

This post provides links to a number of thought-provoking articles I have read over the past few days that you may also find of interest.

• Martin Wolf (Financial Times): The rumours of the dollar’s death are much exaggerated, October 13, 2009. Recent figures have proved that the dollar’s fall is a symptom of success, not of failure. All the same, the dollar-based global monetary system is defective. It would be good to start building alternative arrangements.

• E.S. Browning (The Wall Street Journal): Dow at 10000 as crisis ebbs, October 14, 2009. The Dow Jones Industrial Average surged to 10015.86, passing the symbolic 10000 level much faster than expected and racking up a 53% gain in just seven months. Wednesday’s trading marked the first time the Dow touched 10000 since October last year, when markets were unraveling after the collapse of Lehman Brothers

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