If we didn’t know any better we would think that Jim Cramer was a “gold bug”.  If you can’t win with stocks, you might as well join the asset that many Americans have been buying for years and enjoying great returns.

 Dear Friends:

The financial meltdown the economists of the Austrian School predicted has arrived.

We are in this crisis because of an excess of artificially created credit at the hands of the Federal Reserve System. The solution being proposed? More artificial credit by the Federal Reserve. No liquidation of bad debt and malinvestment is to be allowed. By doing more of the same, we will only continue and intensify the distortions in our economy - all the capital misallocation, all the malinvestment - and prevent the market’s attempt to re-establish rational pricing of houses and other assets.

$2,500.00 Gold and $250.00 Silver

By Peter Degraaf Sep 18 2008 2:36PM   www.pdegraaf.com

‘That’s ridiculous’ I can hear someone saying.

But is it really all that far-fetched?

Let’s begin by adjusting the previous high gold price of $850 set in 1980, into today’s dollar value. By using the US government’s own inflation calculator (bls.gov/data/inflation-calculator.htm or simply Google ‘BLS inflation calculator’), we find out that gold should be trading at $2,260 to match the 1980 high of $850.

For silver the price today should be $129 to match the 1980 high of $48.

If one were to use the statistics maintained by John Williams at Shadowstats.com the numbers would be twice as high: close to $5,000 for gold and well over $250 for silver.

We need to keep in mind that there are today several billion people who were not part of the global population back then. According to Goldman-Sachs an estimated 70 million people worldwide are entering the middle class each year. Once people attain middle class status, they will work hard to stay there or advance higher still.

It is a coincidence that in two rapidly rising economies (China and India), the population has a centuries old attraction to precious metals.

The action in gold and silver during the past few days is an indication of how rapid the price rise can be. In a previous article I used the metaphor of a beach ball held under water. The deeper you push the

We are in historically unprecedented times. The foundation is being laid for a default of USTreasurys in the wake of the greatest regulatory failure in modern history, and the collapse of the US financial system. Anyone who cannot see that suffers from poor vision, chronic nostalgia, low mental wattage, a paycheck from Wall Street, a post in financial press media, or owning an Economics advanced degree. So many changes come with each passing day, not week, that it boggles the mind. Many of us predicted $100 updays for gold, and we almost saw one. The wheels came off the US financial wagon long ago, but only now that fact is being recognized. The monetization largesse finally has gone beyond the corrupt bailouts of fraud kings on Wall Street. My longstanding forecast has been that when the monetary inflation machinery spits output beyond the sanctimonious walls of the Wall Street whorehouses, INTO THE MAINSTREAM, that the gold price would rise substantially. That process has begun, starting with Fannie Mae & Freddie Mac, and now moving to AIG. Only when phony money floods the system where people live, not where the elite conmen with strangehold control the counterfeit processes, will gold shine. So many unexpected upcoming events

We are close to the end of the fourth year out of the five years of the second Central Bank Gold Agreement in which a ‘ceiling’ was placed on the sales of gold by the signatories to this agreement of 500 tonnes a year. This piece looks at the prospects for sales by these signatories in the final year of the agreement and the prospects of a third agreement, which would govern sales of gold in the ‘open’ market.Take a look at the Table here, which demonstrates the selling by the Central Bank signatories.France, Portugal, Switzerland, Austria and Sweden appear to be the only nations with significant announced sales still uncompleted.     Notes to table: -   1. This now includes the unannounced sales for both years from Spain & Belgium, which totaled 177.1 tonnes for the two years.   2. We have excluded the unannounced sales from the totals so as to retain accurate levels of decline in announced sales.   3. Germany’s sales were for coins, which we do not regard as part of the announced