Oxford Club’s Alex Green explains how Wall Street’s supposedly safe structured products became an investor’s nightmare. In reality, they were just a gimmick. Alex says this just underscores why investors should be cautious of any product that comes with “guaranteed” returns.

From Reuters we get the headline “The Banks Are Cheating Us”, with the subhead “Hong Kong investors protest Lehman Brothers losses”, which made me laugh, “Hahahaha!” and think, “Welcome to the real world, Hong Kong chumps!”

Let’s face it — penny stocks get a bad rap in the financial news media. But despite what the pundits tell you, the jabs at cheap stocks are rarely justified. It’s time to bust Five Myths About Penny Stocks.

More than one-seventh of all the silver bullion ‘thought to exist’ in the whole world was suddenly bought up in less than a year, and yet the price of silver has been pounded down to less than 10 bucks an ounce? No wonder I am so bullish on silver!

Ben Stein is such a juicy target to beat up when he’s wrong.  Which is frequently.  I’m shocked I’ve done it only once before.  Beating him up is like beating up Kudlow, Cavuto, — heck, all of the Team Bush apologists who wouldn’t recognize genuine free-market capitalism if it bit them in the ass — all at once.

There is no longer any doubt that we are heading for a deep, deflationary recession. But James Howard Kunstler is more worried about the “tidal wave” of monetary inflation that will follow. With the financial landscape washed clean, the economy will need to be rebuilt on productive enterprise.

Andrew Snyder says this credit crisis could eventually go down as one of the most profitable periods in US history. The country’s biggest and oldest companies are selling at an unprecedented discount. Andrew selects four blue chip stocks set to make huge recovery profits over the next two years.

The base metals were mixed on Thursday. Copper went on a wild ride, rising and falling sharply through a 10-cent range before settling little changed at $1.8571/lb., down just a penny.

It takes more than a globally competitive economy to have a sound banking system. For the third straight year, the United States finds itself at the top of the Global Competitiveness Index (GCI), published by the World Economic Forum (WEF) as part of its annual Global Competitiveness Report.

“Investors are taking losses of up to 90% in the $1.2 trillion market for collateralized debt obligations (CDOs) tied to corporate credit,” reports Bloomberg. Much of the losses have been triggered by the failure of Lehman Brothers and Icelandic bank.