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Gold/Mining/Energy : Gold Price Monitor -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Chispas who wrote (96804)	1/2/2004 12:51:23 PM
From: Chispas	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 116955

Bill Bonner's style today....don't read if you dislike Daily Reckoning. "It was the best of times...and the worst of times. We have written so much about 2003 that we bore ourselves with the thought of it. Still, we glance over our shoulder one last time before turning our attention to the years ahead. (Below...) The great recession/correction/bear market took time off in 2003. There was nothing especially surprising about that; Mr. Bear is a good shepherd. He so loves his sheep, he cannot stand to eat them all at ounce. The Feds did what Feds do - they made things worse, offering more and cheaper dollars to a world already suffocating in them. And investors? The poor little lambs thought it must be a kind of Second Coming...a deliverance from all their debt and financial troubles. Jobs were scarce. But houses and mortgage money were plentiful. So what if it made them poorer in the long run? In the long run we're all dead! The worst stocks - techs - were full of passionate intensity. While the best could barely keep up with the falling dollar. The greenback ended the year as low as it has ever been against the euro. Compared to British pounds, it is at an 11-year low. Against its Canadian cousin, it has sunk to a 10-year low. The fall in the dollar knocked down the value of U.S. stocks, real estate, and other assets by 40% over the last two years - roughly costing Americans $10 trillion in 2002 and another $10 trillion in 2003. Real property rose at nearly 10%...but the dollar fell twice as fast. Americans, who measure their wealth in dollars, ended the year deep in the hole. But who bothered to notice? And thank God for the Chinese. Two heads may be better than one, but even a billion heads cannot seem to figure this one out. While Americans think they can get rich by buying things they can't pay for, the Chinese think they can do the trick by lending money to their deadbeat customers. Without lending from the central bank of China, interest rates in the U.S. would rise...and the jig would be up. Sooner or later, of course, the Chinese will come to their senses. But by then, who knows what shape the world might be in? Meanwhile, gold continued to rise as if somebody, somewhere knew something. And now, surely some clarifying moment is close at hand. Surely, the fix is in...Surely, it can't go on this way for much longer..." dailyreckoning.com