Links

Palladium prices are about to blast off, says our friend Vronsky in an article just out at Gold-Eagle.com. The prospect of enormous growth globally in auto production, coupled with the exhaustion of Russian supplies and a growing demand for palladium ETFs, could squeeze quotes to as high as $2300 an ounce over the next 12 to 15 months, he writes. Click here to read the full article.

If you're troubled whenever the price of gold swoons or fails to rise for weeks at a time, read Ambrose Evans-Pritchard's latest dispatch, Return of the Gold Standard as World Order Unravels.  Regardless of whether gold returns officially to the status of money, demand for it as a hedge against the central banks' depradations is growing around the world and unlikely to diminish any time soon. Click here for the full article.

The Wall Street Journal's Brett Arends, writing for MarketWatch, has come up with ten good reasons why we are doomed to repeat 2008. Click here for his well-argued list.

This YouTube video of an actual Australian TV interview will make you laugh, but it also explains lucidly why Europe's debt crisis can only end in disaster.  Click here to access the video, the link to which was contributed by Rick's Picks forum regular John Jay.

Daniel Greenfield, aka 'Sultan Knish,' has written a provocative essay that sums up the contradictions of New York City, where a glitzy veneer can no longer hide the alarming growth of immigrant slums. The tired, the poor, the huddled masses may still flock to the Big Apple to live, but they do so bereft of such opportunities as beckoned their forebears.  Click here to read the essay.

MarketWatch columnist Peter Atwater thinks the global financial system is in far worse shape now than in 2008, just before Lehman Brothers' overnight demise nearly took the entire banking system with it.  Click here for his lucid description of a global house of cards that is primed to topple.

From the Institutional Risk Analyst, and interesting note on systemic risk:  "The net increase in financial exposures due to the existence of the CDS market in sovereign credit risk has not made the real economy safer, but instead multiplies the dollar amount of the basis risk in all markets, real or imagined. You cannot get rid of systemic risk and "too big to fail" until you limit credit derivative products to holders of actual debt. Instead we have hedge funds and banks gambling on the end of the world."  For the rest of this analysis, click here.

Yesterday, Rick was interviewed by Kerry Lutz of The Financial Survival Radio Network about The Hidden Pivot Method. Click here for the short audio presentation.

A recent appelate decision in New York is precisely in line with the trend, noted in today's commentary, of the courts siding with homeowners who have challenged foreclosures.  Click here for the full story.