How the might have fallen. Once dominant hedge funds have been in a spectacular freefall since their complex world of finance imploded this year. Adrian Ash charts the rise and fall of these giants in Whiskey & Gunpowder:

SO the SPOT GOLD PRICE sank in October, dropping right back to 13-month lows at $683 an ounce. After failing to breach $930, this collapse marked the third step lower from March’s all-time high of $1,032. And from a technical perspective, the Gold Chart looks horrible – recording lower lows and lower highs for the last six months and more.

We love this nugget of irony, idiocy or just plain hypocrisy so much, we have to repeat it — clutching our sides and doubling-up in laughter, tears streaming down our disbelieving faces:

“The reality of the situation is that an open, competitive, and liberalized financial market can effectively allocate scarce resources in a manner that promotes stability and prosperity far better than governmental intervention…”

Damned if they do, damned if they don’t, politicians the world over are looking pretty sheepish right now. Nationalizing failed banks, mortgage lenders and insurance firms hardly makes for a strong election pitch. It won’t do much to coax fresh risk capital into shoring up financial balance-sheets, either. But letting them fail would only look worse…

In the concluding part of his series about the rise and fall of the dollar, Adrian Ash says foreign governments could start to lose faith in the weakening greenback. Major emerging economies such as Russia and China have huge reserves of paper money. But if they decide to hoard gold, as the US and Europe did in the 20th Century, it could be disastrous for the dollar.

The second part of Adrian Ash’s series on the rise and fall of the dollar looks at how an “obsessed” US Treasury hoarded almost all of the world’s monetary gold stock in the first half of the 20th century. In the process, the government nationalized the shiny metal and monopolized control over money. With its overactive printing presses, it still exercises this total control over today’s fiat currency…

In 1971 President Nixon ended the Bretton Woods monetary agreement and sent the dollar into a tailspin. Overnight, the greenback went from being explicitly supported by tangible gold reserves to a faith-based fiat currency. In part one of a new series, Adrian Ash examines how the dollar began its road to nowhere…

The battle between the two ‘flations – inflation and deflation - is far from over says Adrian Ash in The Bullion Vault. Private investors fearing collateral damage might want to take cover. Gold bought near $800 an ounce might just provide some kind or armor…

Investors have turned against gold in the last month, sending the price of the shiny metal tumbling over 20%. But Adrian Ash in the Rude Awakening says the market fundamentals have not changed. Too much debt and inflation threaten to destroy the value of paper wealth. But gold bars are a tangible asset, and cannot be created at will.

Since the days of Alan Greenspan, the Fed has been so petrified of a slowdown it has practically killed the value and stability of the dollar, says Adrian Ash in Whiskey and Gunpowder.

But by keeping interest rates below the rate of inflation for three straight years starting in 2002, the Fed created a bubble in the housing market. That bubble has now popped, leaving in its wake a severe liquidity crisis.

Now big banks won’t lend without the backing of government bonds, and the Fed continues to inflate money supply. All good news for gold, says Adrian…