This is it. With bittersweet emotions, we have come to the final edition of Notes from the Investment Underground. Although without the burdens of daily writing chores I will be free to pursue some exciting trading endeavors, I will most certainly miss having a captive audience for my research and opinions.

Baltimore: If today’s action from the markets is any indication of what investors think about Uncle Sam and his Washington minions, the upcoming mid-term election is going to get interesting.

Nothing talks in Washington any louder than money.

Alex Green, Chief Investment Strategist for Investment U, knows the dollar’s in the gutter and contrary to popular opinion, thinks it has nowhere to go but up.

Is the drop in the dollar worth watching? Just like the sun will eventually shine its last ray of light, the mighty dollar will someday buy its last barrel of oil or its final container of Chinese imports.

We all know it is going to happen, so why bother discussing it. Right?

Doug Hornig, senior prognosticator at The Casey Report, analyzes the alarming trend of U.S. federal debt and its future implications.

“I have always depended on the kindness of strangers,” said Blanche DuBois, in the final words of the play A Streetcar Named Desire. Well, don’t we all.

Many citizens probably still cling to the old saw that public debt doesn’t matter because “we owe it to ourselves.” Wrong. Debt always matters. And as for whom we owe it to, it is a lot of kind (or, at least, not yet unkind) strangers.

Gold gained yet another powerful ally yesterday — hedge fund icon Paul Tudor Jones. The man who famously called Black Monday in 1987 and the Nikkei crash a few years later now thinks “gold appears to be cheap.” In a note to his investors, Tudor said, “I have never been a gold bug. It is just an asset that, like everything else in life, has its time and place. And now is that time… gold’s value should increase as its scarcity relative to printed currencies increases.”

With the markets pulling back, the opportunities for small-cap stocks are opening up again. We felt it was time for another look at small caps and one of the masters of contrarian investing, David Dreman. Having a contrarian view of the markets can be wildly profitable.

Currencies rally…  Eurozone growth unexpectedly stronger!  FOMC extends QE…  Norges is the first!
And Now… Today’s Pfennig!

Currencies adrift all day yesterday…  Data prints begin today with Productivity…  Stop to think!  Chinese data is impressive… And Now… Today’s Pfennig!

Bond bubble remerges… details behind the gov’s latest debt struggle… The slow demise of snail mail… USPS forecasts record losses… Customized drugs: Patrick Cox on a breakthrough set to revolutionize health care… Bill Jenkins with another sign the euro is overvalued… his price targets below…