We love surprises! But only when we see them coming. We’re always wondering: how will we be surprised? What will happen that we don’t expect?

Simon Mellon, who’ll be heading up Bonner & Partners Family Office, our soon-to-be-launched money management and tax optimization service, is keeping in close contact with Notes HQ. 

Right now, there’s more than $9.5 trillion in cash on the sidelines – or more than twice the amount of money currently invested in stock mutual funds, according to MoneyNet.inc and the U.S. Federal Reserve. Private equity firms alone are believed to hold as much as an additional $1.3 trillion.

I bet you don’t own enough gold. Having physical gold in your possession is always a good idea in times of economic turmoil – there is no “uncertainty hedge” like it.

One way to hedge against inflation is to buy gold and silver. This is what hedge fund legends John Paulson and David Einhorn are doing. As Justice Litle pointed out last week in Taipan Daily , Paulson and Einhorn “have gold and gold stock positions running well into the multi-billions for their respective funds.”

Remember the old expression, “I wouldn’t do that for all the tea in China.” People used to associate China with tea. Well, now it’s time to associate China with gold, and a lot of it. Because the Chinese recently announced that they control over 33.89 million ounces of gold for monetary purposes. That’s an increase of 75% in Chinese gold holdings over the past six years.

Stocks surged yesterday. Gold sold off. And more “green shoots” appeared in the form of better than expected consumer confidence figures.  Crisis Strategy Alert editor James Dale Davidson reckons the “green shoots” of recovery proposition are overbought. He also reckons gold is still the asset of choice to hold as the great deleveraging continues.

Is the hoped-for economic rebound merely a mirage? And if it is, how should you play it? For the past few months, optimistic analysts and investors have been scouring the global economy for so-called “green shoots” – a new financial buzzword that refers to any early indicators of a financial recovery.

The United States Bureau of Labor Statistics has an “inflation calculator” on their website. It allows you to enter an amount of money and a previous year and then tells you how much money you would need to have today to match the same buying power.

At 53 years of age, John A. Paulson manages about $30 billion in his hedge funds. Over 2007 and 2008, he pocketed $10 billion in profits after he correctly bet that the subprime-mortgage market would crash.  His Credit Opportunities Fund earned nearly 500% gains in that year.