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I have woken in the pre-dawn to find our direst predictions coming true, with global stock markets taking yet another pounding and U.S. stock futures limit down. Serving as a proxy for the mindset now gripping governments around the world, French President Sarkozy has announced that the French government will, henceforth, buy shares in important French companies in an attempt to prop them up. 'We will intervene massively whenever a strategic enterprise needs our money,' said Sarkozy, a supposed economic conservative, as he pounded the table on behalf of nationalizing industry. The New Age of big government is upon us. Armed with Harry Potter-like magical monetary wands, they are wildly conjuring a deluge of money from thin air to bind the free market and keep it from facilitating the resolution of economic and investment dislocations created over decades. Bud Conrad tells me he is having a hard time adding up all the fiat money that has been committed to the battle for economic - and, by extension, political - survival over the past couple of months. The numbers rolling off the lips of officialdumb have progressed well past the hundreds of millions, or even hundreds of billions, and have now reached the trillions. In that theme, the Fed announced this week that it would drop over half a trillion - $540 billion, to be exact - on the purchase of suspect commercial paper now clogging the portfolios of 'safe harbor' money market funds. Given that there is a total of $3.4 trillion of your money resting in those very same funds, the commitment of $540 billion - about 16% of the total - should be taken as an indicator of just how bad the problem really is....

As investors, the question we have to focus most of our attention on just now is what impact the credit crisis, the bursting housing bubble and the actions of the U.S. government will have on the economy and investment markets in the next six months. We have seen the Fed and the federal government move to panic mode as they try to keep the system afloat. As expected, they have cut rates, as well as having given away checks and rearranged the Federal Reserve's entire balance sheet. The underlying problems have not been fixed with this massive bailout. There are still many credit pot holes out there and new lending remains highly constrained. Even the government tax rebate checks, rather than boosting the domestic economy, were largely absorbed by higher oil prices. The resulting cut-back in consumer spending, coupled with ongoing constrictions in lending, will cause a severe slowing of the economy....

Dear Reader , You don't need me to tell you, but the $1,000 mark is the latest to fall beneath gold's mighty rise. Even so, as a benchmark, the number $1,000 is meaningless. It represents no new high in the inflation-adjusted prices that count...

Dear Reader, Foolishly, I now realize, I closed last week's column by announcing that I would endeavor to write today's entire missive without a single mention of... okay, well, just this once... government. Some readers have suggested that I...