This post is a guest contribution by Dian Chu*, market analyst, trader and author of the Economic Forecasts and Opinions blog.

The dollar’s value against major currencies has fallen in recent months as the US fiscal outlook worsened and amid expectations that interest rates will remain close to zero for some time to fight the economic downturn.

This week, the euro broke above the psychologically important level of $1.50 driving gold prices to record levels, prompting many global central banks intervening on currency markets to slow the dollar’s fall (Fig 1).

How did we get here?

Since the financial crisis last fall, currency markets have taken their cues mostly from stock markets. When stocks plunged in March of this year, investors rushed to the safety of US government bonds, pushing the

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CLUSTERSTOCK.com: Was Microvision (MVIS) Hatchet Job on Seeking Alpha Illegal Stock Manipulation?  SeekingAlpha has pulled the article. Oops. The Masters just covered this story yesterday: SeekingAlpha.com and 'Liam Mulcahy' bring down Microvision (MVIS) Here's the scoop from CLUSTERSTOCK.com: Yesterday, Microvision (MVIS) plunged almost 12% because of a critical article written on the financial blog aggregator Seeking Alpha. Barron's: Microvision (MVIS) shares are sharply lower this morning on a highly negative post about the company... Microvision is developing pico projectors...The post asserts that Microvision’s own projectors, known as The Show, continue to fall behind schedule, and that Microvision is facing a cash crunch. Well, guess what? The article is gone today. Replaced with this message: This article has been removed, pending investigation of claims of material inaccuracies. See Seeking Alpha's policy for disputing an article. The article's author, a "Liam Mulcahy," said he worked ...

A couple of great questions came in on the Seeking Alpha version of this morning's post about run-of-the-mill bear markets and I thought it would be useful to post the questions here and how I answered them.Why do you think we won't have a decline similar to what we had in '00-'03, which was a lot more than 30%?Markets cut in half every so often; the great depression, the mid 1970's; the start of this decade and I also know there was a depression in the 1870's but do not know what the market did then, there was also a bank panic in 1907 that lead to a 37% decline that year. If you notice you see the gaps in time ranging from 22 years on up.I believe the reason for this is that the market "can't" cut in half so soon after doing ...

My recent post about Plum Creek Timber, client holding, was re-run on Seeking Alpha and a reader left the name of a stock I had never heard of before; Timberwest Forest (TWF-UN.TO in Canada and TWTUF on the pink sheets).Timberwest is one of these Canada listed products that ties in with some sort of resource and pays an enormous dividend, the hydro funds fall into this category.The chart goes back a year and compares Timberwest with Plum Creek Timber and Macquarie Infrastructure (MIC), which is also a client holding. Timberwest and Plum Creek are obviously both timber companies and Timberwest and MIC are both not so simply constructed businesses with high dividend payouts.An investor who bought MIC or Timberwest at the wrong time may not have necessarily known that this sort of stock would ...

Another ETF filing with a hat tip to IndexUniverse. WisdomTree has filed for the Middle East Dividend Fund that will include Bahrain, Dubai, Egypt, Jordan, Kuwait, Lebanon, Morocco, Oman, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates. The prospectus has no info on country weightings (none that I found anyway) but surprisingly 54% of the companies have market caps greater than $2 billion. WisdomTree has an awful lot of very interesting funds on the shelf that I'd love to see list but thus far have not. Some of the filings are so old now that I doubt they will list so we'll see if this middle east fund ever lists or not. One thing seems pretty clear to me, frontier markets will open up to investors one way or another pretty quickly. PowerShares has a frontier fund in the works which takes in a few other countries ...