Gold managed to add about three bucks to its price from the beginning of Wednesday morning trading in the Far East…right up until 1:00 p.m. in the London afternoon…which was 8:00 a.m. in New York. At that point, gold tacked on $8 in less than 30 minutes…sat there until lunchtime…then tacked on another $8 in less than 15 minutes. Then one of the usual not-for-profit sellers showed up and that was it for the day. Gold did manage to poke its nose above $940 again…and finally closed above the $940 mark at $940.30.

Does this price have any significance? Who knows, but I can easily tell that ‘da boyz’ have been defending this price with great enthusiasm since June 15th…as the daily market action has been so obvious lately…confirmed by the graph below.

Silver didn’t show up for this party, but

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

• Gary Stix (Scientific American): The science of economic bubbles and busts, July 2009. The worst economic crisis since the Great Depression has prompted a reassessment of how financial markets work and how people make decisions about money.

• Matt Taibbi (Rolling Stone Magazine): The great American bubble machine, July 9-23, 2009. From tech stocks to high gas prices, Goldman Sachs has engineered every major market manipulation since the Great Depression - and they’re about to do it again.

• Bill Gross (Pimco - Investment Outlook): “Bon” or “non” appétit?, July 2009. Investors who stuffed themselves on a constant diet of asset appreciation for the past quarter-century will now be

“The Big Takeover” by Matt Taibbi is probably the best article written to date explaining the financial crisis and how we got to where we are now. Taibbi’s necessarily lengthy article explains the problems, names the “poipetrators”, and exposes all of the conflicts of interest— absolutely a must read.

AIG, Goldman Sachs, and J. P. Morgan turn out to be the major players causing perhaps the greatest financial crisis in modern history— even if the pain is unlikely to get near Great Depression proportions, the dollar losses to individual investors have certainly gone as far.

JPM was the brewmeister of the CDO, a vat full of various kinds of income securities, determined to be less risky because the income on most would almost certainly keep flowing— kind of like the once popular junk bond fund that Wall Street insisted was not risky …