I’ve been quite bullish on Freeport-McMoRan Copper & Gold Inc. (NYSE:FCX) for some time now.  In fact, the stock is up over 119% since I first recommended it to Investor’s Daily Edge readers on February 12th of this year.

America is witnessing a mammoth increase in the money supply.  According to the U.S. Federal Reserve, seasonally adjusted M2 has gone from $7.25 trillion in July of 2007 – to over $8.37 trillion today.  That’s 15.44% more money circulating around the economy in just two years, a colossal $1.12 trillion increase.

For quite some time I was interested in recommending that my readers invest in Russia. I still had concerns about some political issues and organized crime in the country.  Most experts out there tell people to stay away from Russia, so I knew I had to do further research myself.

Why invest in commodities? Two and a half billion people are going to live like Americans in the next 20 years and prices go up over time, that’s the nature of inflation.

The base metals were mixed again on Wednesday. Copper was down in the pre-dawn hours, falling below $1.99, but pulled itself back over the $2 mark as the day wore on, and finished at $2.0133/lb., down 2 cents.

Commodity prices are beginning to stabilize and I expect copper prices to head higher. Copper is not just used for coinage; it is widely used in construction, electronics and automobiles, and the price is closely tied to economic activity.

Gold showed a little life in Far East trading on Tuesday morning…and the bottom was in at the usual 3:00 a.m. New York time…shortly before the London open. From there, it edged higher until noon in London. Then, it and silver were off to the races…but both ran into a brick wall shortly after the Comex opened.

News on the job loss front continued to mount but existing home sales in the United States rose unexpectedly in December and that sparked a mini-rally during Monday trading on the Canadian markets. For the tale of the tape, the TSX Exchange tacked on 0.33%, while the TSX Gold Index gave back 3.2% and the TSX Venture Exchange, Canada’s largest junior exploration bourse, added 0.87% with the advancing issuers edging out the decliners by a 399 to 304 margin on 147 million shares traded.

Pfizer Buys Wyeth for $68 Billion; Existing Homes Sales Rose 6.5%; McDonald’s Posts 5.8% Sales Growth; Freeport McMoran Lowers Sales Targets; Lincoln National Corp Cutting Staff 5%; GM Cuts More Jobs, Production; Petrobras to Cut Costs by $4 Billion; Halliburton Settles Bribery Investigation

Pack your bags, folks – “There’s no more Wall Street.” That’s the damning verdict from Alan Greenberg, former CEO of The Bear Stearns Cos. Speaking on Bloomberg TV’s “Money and Politics” show, Greenberg declared that the existing Wall Street investment-banking model is dead.