The Room

We’re going to be flying low and fast in this weekly scan of the landscape in the quest for items that are 'important,' as opposed to 'merely interesting.' At the top of the list of what we would consider important is the increasing likelihood that the wheels are about to come off the global economy. And, worse, fly through the air and wipe out any number of innocent bystanders. (By now, you and the other readers of our services should already be safely in the duck-and-cover position.) It is becoming clear that more than just our subscribers are beginning to understand the depth, severity, and nature of this crisis: as I begin writing this morning, gold has rebounded to just a few ticks away from the $1,000 mark. By the time I am finished today, we could see that mark taken out. More on that topic later, but first......

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....

What a world I have returned to from my cloistered retreat at the beautiful Vivenda Miranda, scenically situated on a cliff outside of the quaint port town of Lagos, Portugal. Everything has changed. Everything is changing. The storm we have so long tried to help you prepare for is upon us. At this point, I can only hope you have your sails rigged for the storm now breaking, because time is running out. The violent volatility I warned of when last I wrote has arrived, with towering waves now rising up and smashing into the economy - and as an unavoidable consequence, our personal portfolios -- from all sides. Overnight the holders of my mortgage, WaMu, failed, the largest bank failure in history. This week, the golf course that I usually play on was taken over by the government... last week it belonged to AIG. As you don't need me to tell you, that same government now wants to spend over a trillion dollars to bail out Wall Street and to shore up the money market mutual funds - which have so far flown under the radar screen despite portfolios stuffed to the brim with bad paper. While no one was paying attention, U.S. automakers used their election year leverage to win approval for $25 billion in low-interest loans....

By David Galland, Casey Research With the downturn in the precious metals markets making even the most stalwart investors question their instincts; it's good to have some advice from the field about what is really going on out there. Here today David...

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....

In the June edition of The Casey Report, and again in the edition that was put to bed July 2, we warned that the U.S. equities markets were on the edge of the next leg down in the slow-motion crisis now unfolding.

While there is no such thing as a sure thing, the idea that the worst could be behind the economy is almost unimaginable, given the deep structural flaws and governments doing what Doug Casey correctly calls the 'exact opposite' of what they should be doing.

Namely trying to solve a debt crisis by adding more debt.

Of course, as turmoil returns to the broader stock market, investors will again scramble for "safe harbor" investments, and that spells trouble for commodities and commodity-related equities, which are viewed by many as 'recovery' investments....

Summer weather, at least that of the preferable sort, has finally returned to the corner of the globe where your correspondent sits listening, too loudly, to Michael Franti's Yell Fire!. For those of you unfamiliar with Franti and his band Spearhead, his genre is what might be termed "Revolution Rock"... as in taking it to "the man." While I don't agree with many of his lyrics, which skew far left, I do like the music and his thematic focus on peace and, paradoxically, burning things down. Regrettably, in his view the rebuilding would be of a socialist paradise. It is, of course, deeply ingrained in human nature to want everything wrapped up in a nice utopian package. Problems arise, however, because one person's idea of utopia is another's idea of hell. And, inevitably, even utopia's champions awaken one morning in full agreement that their vision was hell... just ask Robespierre or Trotsky. In the end, no one gets their utopia because the entire notion is merely a dangerous fiction that, in the attempt, leads only to the disenfranchisement of one group or groups in favor of another. And, in time, of everyone....

4 reasons why this may be the worst crisis since the 1930s - and 4 projections for what's going to happen... I identify the foundational forces now driving our economy to establish a basis for the investment recommendations you'll read in this advisory in the months to come. The role of the U.S. as the world's dominant economic superpower is now challenged by an out-of-control growth in debt and a deterioration in its reputation as a financial haven. The dollar is losing its special status as the global "reserve currency," is leading, in turn, to higher inflation, higher interest rates, weakening financial assets (stocks and bonds) and runaway prices for commodities. Let the data and let them speak for themselves, with some interpretation along the way....