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Natural resources are the building blocks of the world, essential to progress and prosperity. These commodities, like all investments, can have wide price fluctuations over time. The interactive table provided shows the ebb and flow of commodity prices over the past decade and illustrates the principle of mean reversion—the concept that returns eventually move back towards their mean or average. [Take a look.]

Gold-producing countries are found on nearly all continents, and represent the gamut of economies from developed super-powers to small, emerging market countries. With gold’s spectacular rise in price and related demand, it’s worth your time to know a little bit about where all the gold comes from.

It is easy to be branded a Cassandra when one has nothing but negative forecasts but so be it - it is what I see and believe. It is more palatable to be wrong in a distinguished crowd than as a lone nut, however, so I offer below quotes from 17 others about the coming global financial collapse that will make your stand up. Words: 1226

The disaster in Europe should be pushing the U.S. dollar up more than it is but it’s not, and that has me deeply worried. [I'm] worried that the next leg of the dollar’s decline may be right around the corner; worried that the loss of the dollar’s reserve-currency status could occur more quickly than even I had expected and worried that the “X&@!” may soon hit the fan, across the entire globe. [Let me explain.] Words: 600

Though the complexities may appear endless, the global economy's coming implosion is really fairly easy to understand: here are four charts which do the heavy lifting. Words: 445

The International Monetary Fund wants the rules of the IMF changed so it can lend directly to banks and underwrite a rescue of the Spanish financial system without increasing Spain's government debt. If the IMF is permitted to do so, however, the banking system's control would pass to the IMF and such an increase in powers would be momentous. Here's why. Words: 755

Money/credit expansion (inflation) is insidious and like an addictive drug. The first effects appear to be pleasant - a seeming increase, if not boom, in business; lower interest rates; more available credit and a decline in unemployment - BUT, unless the monetary stimulus is continued, and probably at increasingly higher doses, the temporary high disappears. Below is a sampling of what eventually happens when central bankers try to 'help' the economy by creating money out of nothing. Words: 799

Is gold still cheap? No, gold left bargain territory long ago [but] we remain bullish on gold, not because we think gold is still cheap, but because we expect it to get a lot more expensive. [Why?] Because the world's most important central banks and governments remain committed to a course that ends in catastrophe for their economies and currencies. [Let me explain further.] Words: 565

The European economic situation is explained very simply in the illustration below. Take a look.

"In our view, monetary policy has been boxed in by previous actions, election year politics (and even more broadly by the dynamics of the contemporary state of democracy), and the slowdown in global forex accumulation. The result, we expect, will be a continuation of financial repression under the most optimistic of scenarios. At the very least, returns on liquid capital could remain negative for many years to come. Under such circumstances, demand for the protection offered by gold should remain strong. Should the presumed economic recovery falter, we anticipate that the calls for renewed QE will be deafening." John Hathaway