“Global Demand for Oil to Plummet,” screams a recent Financial Times headline.   Huh?  No it won’t.  Who are they trying to kid?

Global oil demand is not going to “plummet.”  And for the FT to say so is just plain silly, if not irresponsible.  OK, I know.  There’s an old saying that they teach in journalism schools.  “You have to sell newspapers.”  But this declaration by the FT highlights the perils of letting a headline-writer do your thinking for you.  It’s what I call “arguing a screaming conclusion.”  And a wrong conclusion at that.

Oil Demand – Down, Then Up

But let’s move past the headlines.  The Financial Times article explains that the World Bank has just issued a new study.  The World Bank believes that the world is entering into the toughest economic times “since the Great Depression.”  Thus overall world oil demand may fall by about half a million barrels per

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Job market takes another turn for the worse… unemployment data at 26-year high… Government solution:spend… budget and trade deficits swell more than expected… Byron King on falling oil demand… and what it means for long-term investors… Gold soars… Ed Bugos with some fresh price targets… Signs of the times… Chinese bank opens in U.S., world’s biggest LBO collapses… Plus, Chris Mayer on the automaker bailout

Americans filed over 573,000 jobless claims last week — the most since 1982.

The Labor Dept. also said the number of people collecting unemployment reached a 26-year high too, 4,429,000.

Unfortunately, we’re just getting started if a study released this morning by UCLA is accurate. The Anderson School of Management predicts we will see negative GDP for the current and first two quarters of 2009… and the unemployment rate to

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If you subscribe to one of my premium services, you'll have noticed that we've added a bullish gold position or two lately. Let's look at a daily chart of gold to see why.You can see that gold is still channeling lower, but has touched the bottom of its recent downtrend. When it has done this in the past, it usually goes higher for quite some time.At the same time, we are getting a buy signal from the MACD indicator on the bottom -- another indicator of the shift in short-term trend. And gold is now above its 10-day moving average. This usually indicates higher prices ahead.However, I still haven't given buyers of my recent gold report the "all clear" to buy gold and silver positions. That's because the weekly indicator I told you about in that report has still not given a ...