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.

• Gerard Lyons (Times Online): Discovering if we learnt the lessons of Black Monday, October 19, 2009. Today (Monday) is the twenty-second anniversary of Black Monday. On this day in 1987 stock markets around the world crashed. The Dow Jones fell 22.6 per cent in one day, London shed one fifth of its value over two days. The newspapers and television were full of pictures of traders in panic. Sound familiar? Reflecting on 1987 is interesting in its own right and has lessons for today.

• Allan Dodds Frank (The Daily Beast): Hedge fund dominoes, October 18, 2009. Friday’s insider-trading charges against the founder of Galleon could be the tip of the iceberg. Other hedge funds and the McKinsey consulting

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We love surprises! But only when we see them coming. We’re always wondering: how will we be surprised? What will happen that we don’t expect?

It’s easy to make money…if there are no surprises. You just put your money in something that is going up and let it go.

But surprises sink ships, marriages, military campaigns and investment portfolios. Things happen that you’re not prepared for…

A friend told of what happened to a mutual friend:

“I guess it was the embarrassment that bothered him most. I don’t know. He was happily married…or he thought he was. They had three children. They must have been married 10 years. And then, she announced she was a lesbian…and moved in with a woman.

“I imagine he was devastated. He didn’t seem to have any idea. But just think how you’d feel. You’d think that you were so awful you’d turned her off on the whole male sex.

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"It is not just a few investment decisions that are being corrected, it's the delusions of an entire generation." says Bill Bonner in The Daily Reckoning. What's happening is "a huge anti-bubble is forming ... a financial whirlpool marked by exaggerated thrift, debt destruction and sweaty-palmed investors."

Not-for-profit sellers dropped gold $10 in the Globex market almost the moment that the Comex closed, says Casey Reserach's Ed Steer. Silver fared far worse... but it was on very light volume once again. Strangely enough, the share prices did very well yesterday.

By William Patalon III Executive Editor Money Morning/The Money Map Report There are scads of books on the market purporting to tell the story of investing guru Warren Buffett. I know, because during my days as a business journalist, I read - or at least perused - almost all of them. And as my lovely wife Robin will tell you, most of those now-dusty tomes still adorn my office shelves at home - along with all the other "research materials" left over from my 20 years as a journalist and author. But we all know that time is a very precious commodity these days, so please allow me to save some of yours. If you really want to learn about Buffett, the man, and Buffett, the investor, there’s really only one biography worth reading: "Buffett: The Making of an American Capitalist," by ...