— Gold is up slightly, the dollar down slightly. Gold is trading up a little over $5 this morning, to $930. The dollar index remains in solid 71 territory. And today it takes $1.58 to buy one euro.

The ever-widening dollar-euro gap…

— Finance ministers of the G-7 countries are tut-tutting currency traders for beating up on the dollar…

“Since our last meeting,” they collectively warned on Friday in Washington, D.C., “there have been at times sharp fluctuations in major currencies, and we are concerned about their possible implications for economic and financial stability.” Europeans in particular are unhappy that a rising dollar is making their exports more expensive.

And yet…the G-7 gave no indication that central banks are willing to continue buying dollars in the open market.

“They are hoping that the economy will turn around,” Ronald Simpson of Action Economics says of G-7 ministers “that credit markets will stabilize to a degree and perhaps we will start to see a bottom in the U.S. housing market.”

Hoping? Oy. We humbly submit it’s going to take a little more than hope to put some stable footing under the dollar.

— “Have you seen the price of coal?” asks our energy expert Byron King by e-mail this morning. “In 2008, thermal coal prices are set to double, from about $55 to $125 per ton. That’s based on a recent agreement between Japan’s Chubu Electric Power and the giant mining firm Xstrata, and it should become the benchmark for 2000-09 contract prices worldwide.”

Coal generates 40% of the world’s electricity. It’s getting more expensive. And in the United States, it’ll be still more expensive, because every remaining presidential candidate is committed to “clean coal” technology that cuts down the pollution, but at considerable cost.

Spot prices for thermal coal have tripled in the past 12 months. And spot prices for coking coal (used to make steel) have quadrupled over the last 12 months.

“So,” says Byron, “where can we in North America get significant amounts of ‘clean’ electricity with minimal CO2 emissions? Not from coal. How about windmills? Yes, when the wind blows. How about solar? Yes, when the sun shines. And how about geothermal? Yes, all the time. 24/7/365.”

Byron’s five geothermal picks from his Energy & Scarcity Investor portfolio can still be had below his buy-up-to price. And until midnight tomorrow night, we’re making Energy & Scarcity Investor membership available for the lowest price ever.

— Even as hedge fund losses go, this is big.

David Tepper, founder of Appaloosa Management LP, managed a 17% loss in the first quarter on two funds with a combined $6 billion in assets. He bet big on positions in the debt of struggling companies, and lost as the credit markets seized up. Quite the reversal from annual average gains of 28-30% since the mid-1990s.

Aren’t hedge funds supposed to “hedge” against financial turmoil and bear markets?

Not every hedge fund manager gambled their clients’ money away. John Paulson saw his Credit Opportunities fund rise 10% in the first quarter…after he personally pocketed $3 billion last year from smart bets on the housing bubble.

Paulson spoke last week at Grant’s Spring Investment Conference in New York…he’s singing from the same hymnal as George Soros and the IMF, seeing $1 trillion in write-downs once the smoke clears.

— The crisis over rising food prices has claimed its first political casualty. Protests brought Haiti to a standstill last week, so the country’s senate voted over the weekend to remove Prime Minister Jacques-Édouard Alexis. The move comes as President Rene Preval announced subsidies that he promised would cut the price of rice by 15%.

The World Bank also stepped in with an immediate $10 million in food aid. And our old friend Hugo Chavez is promising to send 200 tons of food to Haiti to counter “the attacks of the empire’s global capitalism.”

It’s easy to be generous with other people’s money.

What ordinary Venezuelans suffering from 20%-plus inflation think of Chavez’s generosity he didn’t say.

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