“Gold Is Still a Lousy Investment,” proclaimed a Wall Street Journal headline over the weekend. Does this sound like sour grapes, or what? It ran atop a feature by Dave Kansas in weekend editions. Kansas, who used to work for Jim Cramer, is currently European markets editor for the Journal. We wonder what could have possessed him at this moment to do a hit-job on gold, since it is one of the only investment assets to survive the global asset crash of the last several years. It is also one of just a small handful of investment assets that is still worth more than in 1999. Much more, actually. And most recently, no... Read the Rest of the Article | Comments *** Stanford University is attempting to unload $1 billion worth of hard-to-sell assets — a treacherous undertaking that the Wall Street Journal said was being closely watched by private equity. That’s an understatement, since hundreds of the world’s biggest institutional and sovereign investors have portfolios very similar to Stanford’s, and many of them will be equally desperate to raise cash in these straitened times. The portfolio model they have embraced, perhaps all too eagerly, in recent years was pioneered by... Read the Rest of the Article | Comments *** On the Rick’s Picks web site yesterday, we featured a link to Mish Shedlock’s latest, lovely essay concerning deflation. We thought we could avoid getting drawn into the debate ourselves, but it was not to be: the topic touched off quite a firestorm in the forum that began with this introductory note on the home page: “We stopped ‘debating’ the inflationists a while back simply because their arguments had become too bloody stupid to endure. Obviously, they have not been playing with a full deck, since they continue to obsess over the absolutely useless textbook definition of deflation – ‘a
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