One thing that the world has forgotten for the most part, is that gold is money. It has been parroted around for three generations as a commodity only, with little industrial use or demand, and no value as a currency.

Humans have this interesting tendency to forget history, even though through all of time it consistently repeats itself.

The cycle I am speaking of is the one where societies and economies cycle back and forth between paper fiat money backed by nothing but a governments promise that it has value, and currency that is backed by gold and silver.

This is not new, and in my opinion will happen again, as it always has, for thousands of years.

For a while now I have been going on about how the Chinese, OPEC, and other nations are sitting on trillions of USD in their reserves are not going to simply sit on it and watch

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2 interesting articles this week from WSJ and Reuters on the untamed and unaccountable dark pools in the market.What are dark pools?The WSJ defines them as "the secretive electronic trading networks that match buyers and sellers anonymously." These trades are done outside of the traditional stock markets like the NYSE and NASDAQ.The WSJ journal points to the dark pools at failing on their promise of making it easy to move large shares without affecting price. In fact with more dark pool firms competing for volume and their share of the business, the consulting firm TowerGroup reports that the average trade was just 260 shares at the beginning of 2008. A decade ago it averaged over 1,400 shares. Ugly shrinkage.The Reuters article observes that as a result of the competition for liquidity and volume, many dark ...