If you need more proof that the US lost the Cold War to Russia and China you need look no further than Venezuela, says emerging markets expert Irwin Greenstein, writing for Contrarian Profit. Hugo Chavez, president of Venezuela, inked two significant energy deals with China and Russia that will divert American oil to our former Cold War adversaries.

What further proof do we need that we lost the Cold War than to have China and Russia take over critical oil supplies right in our own backyard?

Americans like to believe that the 40-odd-year Cold War drew to a close in the late 1980s and the early 1990s. That’s when Ronald Regan was president and the Berlin Wall came tumbling down and the Soviet Union collapsed. (That led Dick Cheney to also tout Reagan’s famous fiscal theory that deficits don’t matter.)

With the …

Investors woke up this morning to a new era on Wall Street. The last two big investment banks, Goldman Sachs (NYSE:GS) and Morgan Stanley (NYSE:MS), have abandoned their freewheeling, frat-boy days to become bank holding companies.The move puts them under stricter Federal regulation. More important, they will now look to more conservative sources of money - such as customer deposits - over highly leveraged trading bets.

What remains to be seen, though, is whether the shift could dam up a torrent of money flowing into emerging markets.

Back in the day, emerging markets were the place for investment bankers to wheel and deal. Asia, the Middle East and Latin America became increasingly reliant on this Wall Street money.

Since 2005, both the share and percentage of emerging-market investment banking saw dramatic growth. In 2005, investment-banking revenue from emerging markets accounted for almost $40 billion, or 16% of the global investment-banking revenue total. Those …

The news that Washington is fast becoming the world’s biggest slumlord through the buyout of distressed mortgages helped send international markets skyward.

The biggest gains were in Russian stocks. And this could be the situation for quite some time, says emerging markets expert Irwin Greenstein, writing for Contrarian Profits.

The irony, of course, is that Washington and Moscow are now marching in lockstep with each other when it comes to their stance on market intervention. After a series of unprecedented bailouts, the US has effectively renounced the principle that markets are self-regulating.

This from Irwin…

Russia’s RTSI Index (RUS:RTS.RS) jumped 20.17%. That’s huge, especially in comparison China’s SSE Composite Index (Shanghai: 000001.SS), which gained 9.46% and the Hang Seng Index (HKSE:^HSI), which closed up yesterday 9.61%.

Meanwhile, the Dow closed yesterday with a gain of 3.9%.

That Moscow and Washington have both used massive bailouts to …

The ugly truth can sometimes yield beautiful profits, says Irwin Greenstein, writing for Contrarian Profits. But the truth exposed by the US government’s recent round of Wall Street bailouts is that the US actually lost the Cold War in terms of its free-market philosophy. Investors should adjust their portfolios accordingly…

For a while now I’ve been writing that if you can integrate a historic shift into your investment strategy you may come out ahead. The shift is this: that America actually did lose the Cold War.

This became apparent to me about a year ago when we saw the economies of our old Cold War enemies, Russia and China, continue to thrive as our own free market economy literally started to melt down.

Now with Washington bailing out AIG, it seems that our Cold War defeat is undeniable. The very same foreign-policy …