A surprise to few, luxury homebuilder Toll Brothers Inc. (TOL) posted its second consecutive quarterly net loss today (Tuesday), though the results were better than Wall Street expected.

Last week I tried to open a savings account for my son. The credit union offered me a 1% interest rate… If I had given my money to the credit union, I would have guaranteed my son a 5% annual loss.

Tanned, rested, and ready from a week of hiking in the Rocky Mountains, your editor is happy to report that good Mexican food is still cheap in America and prices are still rising in Australia. But did we miss something while we were away?

Gold hung in at $900 until London opened, then declined modestly until about an hour into the New York session, after which it was hammered, falling as low as $873 before making a small comeback during the Globex to finish at $877.00/oz., down $22.90. Overnight, gold has been flat.

Just one day after Money Morning predicted that the U.S. Federal Reserve would soon be forced to increase interest rates, Dallas Fed President Richard W. Fisher said he expected the central bank would raise interest rates should inflationary pressures start causing severe consumer pain.

‘Imported inflation is generating the greatest damage in Latin America, even when domestic demand remains strong,’ says Paola Pecora.

When the gold standard was abandoned and fiat money became the only game in town, the economy may have been set up to take a huge fall. Can human beings really be so bold as to think they can control the value and worth of a country’s money?

The U.S. dollar is now under incredible pressure, and the timing couldn’t be worse. The U.S. economy is also sinking fast. This places the Fed between a rock and a hard place. To support the greenback, the Fed needs to raise U.S. interest rates…but their classic response to the threat of an economic recession is to lower those same rates.

In his book Greenspan’s Bubbles, Fred Sheehan examines the work done by Alan Greenspan during his tenure as chairman of the Federal Reserve. Today, he shows us how the personality of Greenspan effected the way he ran the economy and how he marketed himself to the media. Was Greenspan a brilliant economic mind, or merely a brilliant self-promoter?

There is no problem created by the Federal Reserve that the Fed can’t make worse. As evidenced by the news today…