We all know about the mess the United States, Britain, Spain and some other countries have gotten themselves into thanks to overenthusiastic housing bubbles.

623K new unemployment claims filed… G-7 begins today… Dealing from a position of strength… Valentine’s Day tomorrow! And Now… Today’s Pfennig!

I can’t decide if this is a case of cluelessness, stubbornness, or both.

Gold terms record highs in sterling terms, Indian futures… SPDR Gold (GLD) Trust sees near 5 percent inflow…

For at least the last two weeks, without exception, gold has been sold off the moment that Globex trading opened in the Far East. Thursday morning was no different. From there, gold and silver didn’t do a thing until the usual 3:00 a.m. New York time, when a nice rally commenced in both metals. But if you note the Kitco gold chart carefully, there was some not-for-profit seller, selling this London rally every time it looked like it showed too much ‘irrational exuberance’ to the upside. This happened five times during London trading. Ditto for silver. The peak in gold came about half an hour after the Comex open. From there, it got sold off until around half-past lunchtime in…

Oil jumps $2 on better-than-expected GDP data… OPEC says “willing to go further” to balance market… Labour action in U.K., U.S. supports crude prices…

Yesterday in the UK publication, Metro,  Jim Rogers advised investors to move to China if they spoke Chinese. Today, I have my own piece of cultural advice: Tell your children to take French and German in school. And while you’re at it, grab your own Rosetta Stone guide to foreign languages… You might need it sooner than you think.

While the rest of the world is grappling with the global slowdown, China is figuring out ways to exploit it.

The unemployment picture took on an even more ominous tone this week as new layoffs emphatically underscored a worsening global economy.  Now, fear is rising that the losses represent a major restructuring in the business world and that some, if not most, of the jobs are gone forever.

How bad is it going to get? Our reference point is the 1930’s and the Great Depression. But people in Russia and Asia only have to recall events of a little more than a decade ago. The “Asian Contagion” actually began in Russia in 1998 when the country defaulted on its national debt. The crisis then hit Thailand and within a year had spread to all of Asia with a few exceptions (Malaysia and China being the main ones).