As a little boy, I used to marvel at the bright yellow Caterpillar (NYSE:CAT) trucks in the middle of construction fields and think to myself “that’s freaking awesome!”.

When Congress sent General Motors (NYSE:GM) its first “bailout” check worth $4 billion earlier this month, few folks thought it would do the company much good. But even fewer thought the company would be crying for help so quickly.

Here they come. At the end of 2008, all the social and personal signs of a real depression were absent. They are making themselves present now. The suicides, the frauds, the job losses…they’re all on the front pages of the papers now. If 2008 was the year of the financial crisis, 2009 will be the year it got personal.

When parent companies decides to let go of a subsidiary, the process is known as a spin-off. Jim Nelson says these spin-off stocks can provide some of the best investment opportunities going. In fact, they repeatedly outperform the parent company in the aftermath of separation.

The late November rally in gold prices wasn’t quite as spectacular as mid-September’s gain, but it was still impressive. There was good follow-through too, though the momentum softened as bulls knocked on resistance near $850.

For Russia lately, when it rains it pours. Not only have plummeting oil prices destroyed the country’s economy, but virtually nobody paid attention to its semi-aggressive war games last month. Even worse, Putin swears he will not be running for president anytime soon. Ford, Volkswagen and Renault are cutting their Russian production. And now the country’s currency gets a public smack in the face.

This country has made an incredible ideological shift in the past three months. I cannot help but think there is a deadly cliff at the end of this unexplored road. It is a scary time for patriotic American.

Congress now tells us that it has put off a vote on any Detroit bailout until after Thanksgiving. It warns the Big Three that it had better come up with a viable plan to use the money to get back on track or the check will not be written.

For those of you who could do with some profits in this mess of a market, it’s as good a time as any to cover our short positions on Las Vegas Sands Corp. (NYSE:LVS). I had updated you on this November 19th.

Never has there been a time where the stock market has influenced the commodities markets so much.

Last time I checked, the price of soybeans, cocoa or orange juice had absolutely no relationship to whether Microsoft (Nasdaq: MSFT), Disney (NYSE: DIS), or Google (Nasdaq: GOOG) declined in price.

But these days, we’ve got a serious blurring of the lines between global marketplaces. In addition, the prevalence and ease of electronic trading, coupled with well-capitalized hedge funds, means we’re seeing all kinds of different markets having an affect on one another.

Not so long ago, it used to be that money typically flowed from one asset class to another – for example, from stocks to commodities. But that isn’t happening now as most players have either bailed…