Here it comes, slowly but surely: “We sincerely hope the U.S. fiscal deficit will be reduced, year after year,” China’s Assistant Finance Minister Zhu Guangyao said overnight after talks with Treasury Secretary Geithner. Could he lay it out any more clearly than this?

You can’t go back. So don’t assume that as the U.S. and the West recovers, they’ll attract foreign capital just like they did before the recession. It’s a far different landscape now. The easy-credit bubbles are gone. And they’ve left us with a hellacious debt burden.

With the global economy on the mend, could gold be gearing up for another record-setting run? It sure looks that way. 

This is an eye-opener. Whenever I talk about the Great Depression and compare it with what is going on today, I get a lot of skepticism. I hear a lot of people say, definitively, “This isn’t as bad as the Great Depression.”

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I was surprised that Barron’s reported that the banks show their Total Reserves fell from $896 billion to $848 billion,which is a simple math problem that seems custom-made for my abilities in that regard.

U.S. stocks fell today, Monday, as investors worried about the potential strength and timing of an economic recovery, sending oil prices and energy shares lower.

World stocks fell today, Friday, after a disappointing U.S. jobs report and a sluggish euro zone services sector survey reinforced expectations that the process of recovery in the global economy would be long and slow.

When oil prices moved to over $30 a barrel in the mid 1980s, it was considered a significant event. It also signaled the birth of small ethanol companies in the Midwest. Many of them managed to hang around long enough to get a second wind when Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait and the ensuing Gulf War pushed oil prices past $40.