As demonstrated by his previous market calls George Soros is an investor worth paying attention stock to. He is currently buying gold hand over fist, as he believes that we are closing in on a bear market.

I knew the monetary base had grown wildly but did not realize the extent until seeing it in graph form [in an article by Peter Degraaf. It is truly the Chart of the Century]. While Peter spent just one paragraph on this, let's look at it in depth to get a better understanding of why it is so important and what it really means.

"The artist Christopher Wool has a word painting: ‘Sell the house, sell the car, sell the kids.’ That’s exactly how I feel — sell everything. Nothing here looks good" … "The stock markets should be down massively but investors seem to have been hypnotized that nothing can go wrong." - Jeffrey Gundlach

There are four stages of fiat money printing that have been used by central banks throughout their horrific history of usurping the market-based value of money and borrowing costs. It is a destructive path that began with going off the gold standard and historically ends in hyperinflation and economic chaos.

Stocks don't have to immediately melt down today or next week, but it does mean that there’s a lot of risk percolating just below the surface – and El-Erian is worried that when it does bubble up, it could be more like a volcano than a hot spring.

Investors globally have never faced risk of the magnitude that the we are now exposed to but, sadly, very few are aware of the unprecedented risks the world is facing. For the ones who understand risk and take the right decisions, it will “lead to fortune”. Only very few will choose that route, though. Instead most investors will continue to...

One in six investors chose gold as the best place to park money they wouldn't need for more than ten years – the same number that chose stocks, according to a recent Bankrate survey. Another 6% chose bonds, while 25% chose real estate, and 23% said they would simply bank the money.

The gold miners-to-gold ratios are indicators that show how many gold ounces are required to purchase one share of an index. Technically, the numbers are the value of the index divided by the price of gold. They show a relative value of miners to the price of bullion, thus indicating whether gold stocks or gold are overvalued or undervalued relative to each other. When the ratios are low, miners are cheap compared to gold, and when the numbers are high, gold stocks look expensive relative to bullion. Let’s examine a chart to see what it says is the situation these days.

Italy is facing its greatest crisis in the postwar era. The country’s banking system is bankrupt, and no one in Europe is willing to fix it. As a result the euro could start to drift toward dollar parity as the situation in Europe goes from bad to worse.

“Crexit:” a credit crunch brought about by plunging bond prices, soaring losses, an implosion in China’s high-risk debt markets, and a reversal of all the “yield chase” trades investors have flocked to in the last couple of years. That's what S&P's debt analysis team fears is about to unfold with the acceleration in corporate debt and That tells me there’s more going on beneath the surface – and that caution is still warranted when it comes to your investing strategy.