Is gold ready to break out?

Goldman Raises $5 Billion to Repay TARP; Cost Cutting Will Save Royal Phillips $664 Million; Johnson & Johnson Earnings Saved By Cost Cuts; Singapore Forecasts 6%-9% 2009 Decline; Discover to Cut 500 Jobs; LIBOR Rate Dropping Fast; Coal Prices to Stay Low in 2009; Madoff Firm Files Bankruptcy

While the rest of the global banking system falls apart, Canadian banks are receiving the highest rankings as healthy, competitive stocks. Mark Skousen of Investment U says that superior bank stocks will soar when the markets recover. 

By grabbing $26 billion in private pension money last month, Argentina may have put itself on track for its second debt default in a decade – ironically, the very situation that country’s government had hoped its bit of leisure-fund larceny had hoped to avoid.

U.S. stocks yesterday (Monday) staged their biggest rally since the Great Depression – with the Dow Jones Industrial Average soaring an all-time record 936 points – on a Federal Reserve-led push to flood the ailing global financial system with dollars and on a U.S. government plan to buy stakes in banks.

The Fed’s policy meeting looms large today. And it looks likely that, with the inflation cat out of the bag, that the feds will hold off on more rate cuts.

In fact, every one of the 101 economists surveyed by Bloomberg said that they thought the Fed would leave rates unchanged.

Money Morning’s Jennifer Yousfi examines why the likelihood of further rate cuts has fallen in recent days…

Crude oil is grabbing the headlines but it’s coal and uranium that together provide nearly half the world’s power.