“Consider what happens when individuals barter with each other,” he said. “A baker trades a loaf of bread with the farmer for a dozen eggs. A tailor trades a suit of clothes for a cow. A migrant worker trades an afternoon’s labor for a meal and a place to sleep. Is a ‘trade deficit’ possible in any of these cases? Could there be a deficit if, say, a shirt maker in China trades 1,000 shirts for 100 barrels of oil from, say, some producer in Texas?”

“Obviously, no. A gives something to B in exchange for something else and both get what they bargained for. No deficit is possible.”

“So how is it that when the farmer, or the migrant worker, or…

Responding to growing concern about the quality of the Federal Reserve System’s assets, former Federal Reserve Governor Lyle Gramley told reporters last week that “You have to reckon with the fact that one of the Fed’s assets is gold certificates, which are priced, as I remember, at US$42 an ounce, and if we were to price them at market prices, the Fed’s leverage would look a lot less than it is now.”

Humor me. Let’s crunch those numbers.

Those gold certificates have a book value of about US$14 billion, if you include special drawing rights and coin holdings ($1.7 billion). Even if you revalued this inventory, it would still total less than $300 billion, or 12% ofthe Fed’s total assets. So far,…

Puru Saxena sees a historical opportunity for long-term gains amid the current financial meltdown. There is currently around $3.5 trillion sitting on the sidelines, waiting to be invested in strong sectors. Puru says natural resources and industrials still have strong fundamentals, meaning they may never again be as cheap as they are today.

It’s inflation or die for global central banks, says Eric Roseman. The market is pricing in a deep recession and a stretch of deflation. But in the coming year, these desperate reflation policies will work. And when they does, inflation-hedging hard assets will soar. Eric says this makes now the perfect time to accumulate gold.

One of the biggest fears today is that the US is entering a Japanese-like slump that could last a decade. But Justice Litle says we have learned the lessons from that crisis. This time, the government fears doing too little, but gives little thought about the risks of doing too much. And this is why we should be more scared of one day ending up like Zimbabwe…

Deflation is every central banker’s worst nightmare, says Justice Litle. That’s why the Fed is pumping huge sums of money into the financial system. But if none of that money moves around the economy, it won’t make much difference. And so more dollars will be printed. Justice says this strategy means either a return to inflation or an all-out collapse of the dollar-based monetary system. Either way, gold will skyrocket.

Dan Denning takes issue with the idea that the Fed will be able to mop up the excess liquidity caused by its monetary expansion. Foreign savers are not going to keep funding US deficits forever. And that means the Fed must print more dollars to raise money. And that is super inflationary.