This post provides links to a number of interesting articles I have read over the past few days that you may also enjoy.

• Jason Clenfield and Norihiko Kosaka (Bloomberg): US risks Japan-like “lost decade” on stimulus exit, Koo says, October 23, 2009. US officials contemplating an exit from record fiscal stimulus are in danger of repeating mistakes that plunged Japan into its lost decade of stagnant growth, according to Richard Koo of Nomura Research Institute. “This isn’t a cold, its more like pneumonia,” said Koo, author of “Balance Sheet Recession,” a 2003 book about the malaise that hit Japan after its stock and real-estate markets crashed in 1990. “We still need more government spending,” he said, adding it could take “three to five years to get out of this mess, even under the best of circumstances.”

• Brad DeLong (Caijing.com.cn): A moment too soon after the

Gold slid about four dollars between the Globex open on Thursday night and around 10:00 a.m. in London on Friday morning. From there, gold quietly rallied about $11…with the peak coming shortly after 9:00 a.m. on the Comex in New York…and that was it for the day.

Silver was a different animal altogether. After sliding about a dime in Far East trading, silver also began its climb starting around the same time as gold in early London trading…and by the 8:30 a.m. on the Comex…it had tacked on 40 cents. That was obviously too much strength for somebody in New York, as the rally got squashed, and half that gain disappeared.

The HUI peaked about the same time as the gold price in New York and closed quietly positive in pre-long weekend trading. But having said that, please don’t think that yesterday was a quiet trading day. Far from it. Here is

Wall Street created the U.S. housing bubble and now it’s missing the real estate rebound.  And Andrew Waite understands why.

Waite is the publisher of the Personal Real Estate Investor, a glossy magazine that focuses on investors who buy houses or condos to manage for income or to fix up and sell for a profit. But he’s not some industry cheerleader whose statements are nothing but spin.

He’s a true expert on the U.S. housing sector who goes out of his way to “educate” journalists about the true state of the American housing market, and who criticizes most of the “indicators” in use as useless and irrelevant. Plus, as a onetime Wall Street venture-capitalist who subsequently joined Silicon Valley’s Sand Hill Road private equity crowd, Waite really understands how the Wall Street investment game is played - and, in the case of the