Chris Mayer (Penny Sleuth):
“If you can tell me something else where the fundamentals are so attractive…I’d be happy to put my money there,” said Jim Rogers, the famed investor and self-made billionaire in a recent interview. “But I don’t know of any other place.”

Most of us Americans are so accustomed to a world of plenty; we have a hard time imagining a world of scarcity — much less making investments based upon this idea. But the energy markets provide a very powerful example of what happens when resources become less plentiful.

The recent devastating earthquake in China will push record food prices in the country even higher. However, experts say the earthquake will not slow economic growth.

“There will be less supply of pork, less supply of rice,” said Sun Mingchun, a Hong Kong-based economist at Lehman Brothers Holdings, speaking to Bloomberg. “It’s not causing supply to decline drastically but it is definitely less. The impact on inflation is more than its impact on growth.”

Is the economy poised for a recovery, as the stock market seems to expect? Or are we in for another few more quarters of recession and/or slow growth?