Here’s a roundup of this week’s commentary:

Obama’s Honeymoon Officially Over

Hard to believe Obama is already knee-deep in ethical muck. Even Maureen Dowd has gone on the attack, albeit with 28-ounce gloves: “Obama [was telling schoolchildren] his favorite superheroes were Batman and Spiderman,” the New York Times’ third-ranking Bush-hater wrote on Thursday, but “his own dream of being the superhero who swoops in to swiftly save America was going SPLAT.” Is the honeymoon already over, the huge Inaugural throng on the D.C. mall just a faded memory?

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Bank Shares Just Lotto Tickets

We searched in vain for news that might have explained why Bank of America shares collapsed 15% from their highs yesterday. After a head-fake on the opening, the stock fell 67 cents to 4.68, bringing it that much closer to the vanishing point. We are predicting BAC will fall even lower in the days ahead, to at least 3.93. That would represent a decline of 90% since the stock was added to the Dow Industrial Average a year ago. As B of A was plummeting, the shares of another former banking star, Goldman Sachs, were soaring, rising more than $7 at one point during the session. GS settled at 87.50, up 4.69 and miles from the $29 target we have predicted for it. (A hula number, by the way. We have pledged to don a grass skirt and dance the hula in Times Square in the middle of winter if the stock does not eventually collapse to the target within the next year or two.)

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Hidden Pivots Worth Stealing

What better proof that Hidden Pivots work than the existence of a trading group that steals and uses them religiously every day? These guys have been doing it for quite a while, but when they denied me access to their discussions recently, it was as though I’d shone a flashlight on a bunch of cockroaches, sending them scuddling into the greasy recesses of denial. Instead of copping to brazen copyright theft – or, heaven forbid, apologizing — their first instinct was to find out who in the group had ratted them out. (Note to all of you: There are a probably a dozen in your room whom I need only ask politely to find out what the rest of you evidently would break the law to hide.) Ironically, one of them had lectured me about his “Christian value cores” [sic] when I booted him out of my own chat room long ago for a variety of reasons, one of them related to honesty. He apparently needs an Old Testament refresher – specifically, Exodus 20:15: “Thou shalt not steal”.

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Calling All Deflationists!

We took on the conventional wisdom of Gary North here yesterday because we are living in unconventional times. This isn’t the Eisenhower era, for sure, and we don’t expect the dire economic troubles that have come to dominate the news, if not yet our individual lives, to simply melt away over time. Not that North’s vision of the futures is all sunshine and lollipops. He has always been a persuasive doom-and-gloomer who has put his money where his mouth is. He ensconced himself in an exurban fortress in preparation for Y2K, equipping it with redundant utility backups that probably could have kept a small town’s lights burning and water running for months. And he is probably still doing immune-system calisthenics to ward off bird flu. (From what we know of this disease, which in China recently started to kill humans rather than birds, we would be the last to disparage North’s seemingly kooky dedication to preparedness.)

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Killer Deflation Eludes Monetarist North

In the Inflation vs. Deflation debate, Gary North has come up with this grabber-of-a- headline: “If Deflation Is Coming, Sell Your Gold,” he writes at LewRockwell.com. If North is trying to scare deflationists into abandoning their arguments, giving banner play to such bad advice should only make them snicker and hoot. For in fact, deflation is already here in spades, in the form of a financial implosion that has wiped at least $80 trillion dollars worth of “wealth” from the world’s books. And in the midst of this, of course, gold has performed superbly for investors.

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