What has really changed?…importing inflation…hoping to prove Friedman wrong…Can the U.S. central bank really begin fighting inflation in a serious way? Ah, dear reader – there’s a cruel twist to this story…The cure for high prices is high prices…and so the global economy lurches forward…and more!

Russian authorities have issued a summons to Robert Dudley, Chief Executive of BP PLC’s (ADR: BP) regional joint venture TNK-BP Holding, as part of a tax probe into OAO TNK’s activities between 2001 and 2003.

There are those who will tell you that oil is a cyclical business and a global fungible commodity. It rises and falls with the business phase. If you look at a hundred-year chart, it is as obvious as a sidewinder on a sand dune. A sine wave through time — up and down in seven-year cycles.

Last Thursday, Mechel OAO (MTL:NYSE) announced record results for 2007.

Short-term speculators are selling Asian stocks in their droves. No more so than in my favourite market of them all: Vietnam.

Early this week, we introduced the idea of buying the ABCs – Australia, Brazil, and Canada – as a way to own commodities for the long term. Several DailyWealth readers wrote to ask, “Great… but what about Russia?”

What you’re looking at below is a chart of the gold-to-oil ratio. The gold-to-oil ratio is exactly what it sounds like. You simply take the spot price for an ounce of gold — around $900 per ounce as of this writing — and divide it by the price of a barrel of oil.

OK, this is very much a “work-in-progress”, but here’s a selection of some of the stocks we’ve been looking at lately. All three are UK based and UK listed. But each of them has an ‘international flavour’ — just what you need in your portfolio right now!

Hey, Irwin…Did you notice that Russia was the only emerging market that was up in your index on Friday? Shouldn’t have been hard to spot that bit of green in the sea of red.

Wall Street firm Goldman Sachs made the term “BRICs” famous in a 2003 research report.