America’s finest quality is that it has no memory! Three months ago, the topic of the day was which window to jump from; today all I hear is how hot the market is. This morning’s conversation on “Squawk Box” was how the market has moved 24 percent and maybe there is too much exuberance.

Too much exuberance? Last October we were wondering if there would be a run on the banks. Now it’s too much activity.

This complete lack of an ability to remember any bad news has a backside, you knew that was coming. The backside is that we also are blinded by the short-lived bad news.

For four months, almost every editor at “The Daily Edge” described the market this fall as the best buying opportunity of our lifetime. Virtually no one paid any attention.

The only thing more deficient than our memory is our ability to buy when things are cheap,

GoldDrivers 2009 – Extraordinary Bullish Outlook for Gold

By: Eric Hommelberg ldSeek.com

It sure has been a brutal year for gold and its shares and many may wonder if the $1030 top clocked in March 2008 marked the top for the gold bull market that started in April 2001. Despite the fact that many analysts want you to believe that gold has failed to act as a

A lot of investors woke up recently to find their money had ‘disappeared’ in Bernie Madoff’s $50 billion Ponzi scheme. And it all happened under the noses of the regulators. Byron King says there are probably many more scammers out there. And the US government is among them. He says this just strengthens the case to buy gold and silver.

This from Whiskey & Gunpowder:

What if you woke up one day and there was a flying saucer sitting in the middle of Central Park? It would change your view of the world, if not the universe, right? At least that’s the idea behind the newly released remake of the classic 1951 film The Day the Earth Stood Still.

And what if you went to bed one night and thought that you had money on account in a fine silk stocking firm? What if you believed that you and your family were well

Tuesday December 23, 2008 Navivest

Commercial finance company CIT Group (CIT) announced today that it has received preliminary approval to receive $2.33 billion from the government’s $700 billion financial bailout fund.

CIT will receive the funds from the Troubled Assets Relief Program, or TARP, which congress approved earlier this year, to help bolster the balance sheet of large banks and Wall Street investment banks.

The TARP money was originally intended to purchase mortgage-backed securities and other such related debt that was weighing down the balance sheets of financial institutions and furthering the credit crisis.

However, lots of different companies are lining up to get bailed out under the plan, with some non-bank financial companies actually converting into bank holding companies as JP Morgan and Goldman Sachs have done, or just smaller banks.

CIT also announced that its’ CIT Bank unit has been approved by the Commissioner of the Utah Department of Financial

by Alexander Green, Chairman, Investment U Investment Director, The Oxford Club Monday, December 22, 2008: Issue #905

During the current economic crunch, top executives at Bear Stearns, Lehman Brothers and other financial giants received hundreds of millions of dollars in compensation… just before their firms keeled over.

This is galling to many. But the excessive and unwarranted compensation at Bear Stearns and Lehman doesn’t bother me, personally. Why? Because I never owned a share of either one of them.

However, we all have a stake in the future of the U.S. economy. No one can afford to ignore how Uncle Sam spends money. Fiscal policy will play a key role in determining the strength of the economy, the performance of our financial markets and the value of the dollar.

The incoming Obama administration is talking about spending up to a trillion dollars - a temporary shot in the

What else could happen in the world of finance. 2008 has certainly been a pretty lousy year and now we have sunk to the lowest of the low, as former Nasdaq stock market chairman Bernard Madoff was arrested on claims that he ran a Ponzi scheme. He purportedly lost tons and tons of money in bad investments and then took fresh principal that was invested with his firm to pay off earlier investors. Losses are estimated to be at least $50 billion. Yes, that’s not a misprint, $50 billion. Yikes.

According to Marketwatch: ” On Wednesday, Madoff told two senior employees that he was “finished,” that he had “absolutely nothing,” that “it’s all just one big lie,” and that it was “basically, a giant Ponzi scheme,” federal prosecutors said in their statement.

We may be in the middle of a pre-Christmas rally, but Andrew Gordon says next year’s economic outlook is dire. Job losses are soaring and consumer spending is drying up. And the great unwinding of the credit cycle is not done yet. Andrew says the Dow is due another swoon, perhaps all the way down to 6,000.

This from Investor’s Daily Edge:

It’s a bullish sign when the market turns its back on horrible economic news. How the market could ignore an historical loss of jobs and go up 259 points like it did last Friday is beyond me … unless the market has bottomed.

Maybe it has. Maybe my colleague Mr. Rick Pendergraft is right. He usually is.

But every fiber of my being is telling me, “Don’t believe it.”

When the dotcom fantasy caused the market to crash, Greenspan quickly lowered rates and gave the mortgage industry the green

Will -533K turn to -600K? … A glimmer of light brings back risk takers…  Another week of data…  Fedspeak today… And Now… Today’s Pfennig! OK… Did you see the rot on labor’s vine Friday? The Jobs Jamboree was very unkind to many, with a 533K jobs lost in November. That number was the worst figure since 1974! The tally of 1.9 million jobs lost this year surpasses the losses of the past two recessions, and according to the Wall Street Journal, signals that the current downturn could be

There wasn’t a lot of activity in Thursday’s trading in gold in the Far East. However, at 3:00 a.m. New York time, there were some signs of life…but even the slightest attempt at a rally was met by equal bouts of selling. This ‘up-down-up-down’ activity went on for eight hours.

But shortly after the London p.m. fix was in, a serious seller showed up and took both gold and silver down to their respective lows of the day. Then, at precisely 1:00 p.m., G-Dubya opened his mouth…and one of the biggest turnarounds in gold, silver…and the stock markets…took place. The prices of both metals continued higher into after-hours trading on the Globex. Once again, these rallies in gold and silver looked like short covering to me. But, regardless of the cause of the price rises, the precious metals stocks did equally as well. Volume was only so-so in both metals.

Gold open

I just can’t make up my mind:  Is Hank Paulson committing premeditated murder of the U.S. economy, or merely negligent homicide?

Constant readers know I’ve gone back and forth on this:  In September I figured the bailout bill smacked of making things up as he went along.  But on Monday I took note of the phone conversation he had two months before Washington Mutual collapsed, in which Paulson told WaMu’s CEO he ought to sell out to JPMorgan Chase (NYSE:JPM) because his company was in big trouble.

I guess it’s possible Paulson knew bad things were going down, but he still didn’t know what to do about it.  And this morning, the making-things-up-as-he’s-going-along thesis seems inescapable.  I mean, really: The bailout bill was predicated on buying up toxic, er, um “troubled” assets.  Then in the middle of the game it became a hybrid of buying up “troubled” assets