I truly believe that inflation is one of the worst and most insidious forms of theft that plagues this country. It's an inconvenient fact that inflation hurts poor people the most. It's a regressive tax. Depressed wages, higher energy costs, high unemployment, endless war, tax increases, benefit cuts - these societal maladies all stem from inflation, which of course is a byproduct of excessive debt.

We know that state-run central banks ALWAYS try to inflate their way out of debt. It's simply the easiest way to make debt go away. If you disagree, then just remember how painful it was for our current leadership to raise taxes by $400 billion for the next 10 years. And they still haven't cut spending! So if you doubt that inflation will be how we deal with our debts, then I don't know what to tell you.

Ben Bernanke and Tim Geithner

It's true that the United States and most American citizens are in a truly terrific amount of debt. But the market is infinitely more complicated than most people think. And in one of those strange twists, while the whole world seems to be circling the drain in debt - American savings deposits are through the roof.

Don't get too excited - the current debt levels still dwarf our saving. But with the fiscal cliff looming, and a variety of other "uncertainties" plaguing the market, people seem to want to save in the safest way possible. So much so that in the past four years since the start of the financial crisis (which, you might recall, centered around banks), deposits have nearly doubled from $3 trillion to nearly $5.5 trillion!

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Now, these savings deposits, though they're not one single entity, are the most liquid and largest pile

Gold is one of the rarer elements in the earth's crust. That's one of the reasons it functions so well as a medium of exchange and store of value: it's nearly impossible to flood the market with gold. That's all the more true when you look at the amount of gold in existence compared to how much of it gets mined and used up every year. Very little gold gets mined every year, at least in comparison to the "above-ground" supply. So it's a stable gauge for measuring the price of nearly anything else. It's like a ruler that stays about the same length - while everything else shrinks and grows at much faster rates of change.

Compare gold as an asset class to another favored asset class: stocks. Unlike gold, the amount of stocks and the value of each stock can change massively from one year to the

The dollar is on the rise.

That's good news for people who hold dollars. It means that the dollars you spend today stretch further than they did yesterday, two weeks ago or even a couple months ago. And it's a very, very strange occurrence. But it's important to remember that it's only a short-term trend.

As you may know, the long-term trend line of the dollar is shockingly abysmal. According to the rosy estimates of the federal government, the dollar has lost over 80% of its value since 1971, when we officially ditched the gold standard.

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Of course, I suspect the real data would be much worse. So what does it mean when the dollar rallies for two straight months - as it recently did?

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It's an anomaly, and it's the reason why we've seen stocks tumble alongside gold, silver, oil -

I own shares of Chesapeake Energy Corporation (NYSE: CHK). Unfortunately, I bought them at just about the highest price they traded at this year – and they've done nothing but fall since. But I'm not selling just yet.

If you own shares of Chesapeake Energy – here's what you need to know. Chesapeake is still the largest independent natural gas producer in the United States. Exxon-Mobil (NYSE: XOM) produces more gas, but it is clearly not a pure natural gas play.

Right now, shares are getting clobbered following news of a recent $4 billion loan Chesapeake took from Goldman-Sachs (NYSE: GS), on top of another $1 billion bond offering. The company now seems to suffer from that death-knell of indebted entities – a "cash-flow problem." We've heard about cash-flow problems from people like Irish bankers in 2011, General Motors (NYSE: GM) and Lehman Bros circa 2008…

We've thoroughly discussed the unhelpful practice of pricing assets in dollars. It's a yardstick that changes length on a daily basis. And over any significant period of time, the price movement of gold, or oil, or cotton - anything - is misleading at best. So it's better and more useful to look at the relative price movement of different asset classes.

I like to use gold to price oil - for instance. Or I like to look at the broad stock market in comparison to the price of gold. That kind of comparison effectively scrubs out the dollar in the denominator - and gives us a more pure look at the real story of supply, demand and price.

Gold is especially useful because there's such a static supply of the stuff. It's a kind of mirror that tells us the relative health of other assets.

In the past, I've discussed

Earlier this week, my colleague Chris Preston alerted you to super-low prices in what is known as "soft" commodities - things like corn, sugar, and cotton. Chris left out one commodity - and it's one that is very important to me personally. I'm talking about coffee.

I wanted to focus today's issue on one compelling coffee investment opportunity that both hits close to home (for me - here in Vermont) and one that I think could be safe and profitable for you.

It's a little complicated at first blush - but I've asked another one of my colleagues, Andy Crowder, to help me construct an options trade to take advantage of what I perceive to be an excellent low point for one of the world's greatest coffee investments: Green Mount Coffee Inc (GMCR).

I live less than 1 mile from Green Mountain Coffee in Waterbury, VT and I

In late 2011, I alerted you to a precious metals trade that I conducted in my own personal portfolio. On November 1, 2011, I wrote,

Something extremely unusual is happening in the platinum markets right now. And I'm about to buy a platinum ETF in my personal investment account…

Like silver, most platinum is consumed in industrial use every year. Whereas most of the world's mined gold is sitting in a vault somewhere, most of the world's mined platinum is used up. Some of it is recycled, but the net effect is that very little readily available platinum is sitting in vaults.

But as I said, something strange is happening with the platinum market.

Usually, platinum prices are higher than gold prices, for the reasons above. But recently, it's been selling for LESS than gold.

Such an occurrence does not happen very often, and when it does, platinum

At the beginning of 2012, I wrote about Freeport-McMoran (NYSE: FCX), calling it my favorite stock of the year.

I wrote:

It's the biggest copper miner in the world. It owns the mining rights to three of the world's largest copper mines - one in Utah, one in Indonesia and one in South America.

According to the 2011 Forbes 2000 list, Freeport is the also the highest ranked gold mining company. Forbes ranks companies based on sales, profits, assets and market value - so Freeport beat out market favorites like Gold Corp (NYSE: GG), Barrick Gold (NYSE: ABX) and Newmont Gold (NYSE: NEM).

Even better: Freeport currently trades for less than 10 times earnings, and they pay a 2.2% annual yield. Even for a big boring mining company, 10 times earnings is cheap. The entire sector is cheap now too - with the average PE ratio just above

I'm not supposed to give you free stock picks - my bosses remind me that it's better to tease investment ideas and trends and then upsell you to a paid product, than to just give away ideas. But frankly, it's tiresome to constantly tease something, it's not very fun, and I know you probably don't appreciate it either.

So today, take my word for what it is: an honest and heartfelt plea to pay attention to gold stocks.

Why?

Well, let's take a look at a 3 year chart of the Amex Gold Bugs Index [NYSE: HUI]. It tracks the 16 largest publicly traded gold (and silver) companies - and is more or less a useful snapshot of the industry as a whole.

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In red, I've blocked out a price range of what traders might call "high congestion." There's lots of support and resistance areas in

On March 22, 2012 I wrote an article about what I perceive to be a potential danger to investors: a dividend trap. The premise of the article is simple: investors are starved of yield - by design of the Treasury and the Federal Reserve - and Wall Street knows it. So Wall Street will likely conspire to inflate yields to draw investors into stocks.

I pointed out that famed market guru Bruce Krasting noted a tendency of companies to pay dividends from debt. He wrote: "These are referred to as Dividend Deals. The borrower takes on new debt in order to pay a stock dividend to common shareholders. (I prefer to see dividends paid from cash flow from operations, not new debt.)"

I then made a big and frankly pretty stupid mistake with reference to an example of such a company. I talked about Seadrill (NYSE: SDRL), a

Gold is down 10% from about 5 weeks ago.

Oil is down about 5%. Silver is down over 10%.

Even Treasury prices have fallen:

What's going on?

At first blush, it appears that everyone is selling nearly everything - but that perception is something of an illusion.

The simplest answer is that a little bit of dollar strength is clawing back some gains. The US dollar index is up about 2% since late March, which is a pretty significant move. And since November, the dollar index is up nearly 10% - which is a huge move.

Think of the US dollar index as a short term indicator about the relative strength of the dollar rated against other currencies. As other currencies get weak relative to the dollar, that price action tends to be bearish for dollar denominated assets.

But as I said, it's a short term indicator. After all, the

We're still in the middle of a long-term bull market in gold. How can I tell for sure?

Well, the simplest way to know that you're witnessing a bull market in any asset is that its price tends to rise, month over month, year over year, even decade over decade.

• So far this year gold prices are up about 6%:
• Over the past 12 months, gold prices are up about 14%.
• And over the past 10 years, prices rose 350%.

But how do we really know that the bull market is intact? Why do I believe we're still in the middle of the bull market - instead of at or near the end?

Well, I have dozens of reasons - but today I'd like to highlight one important reason that you should be aware of if you own gold or gold securities.

First, we have to understand why people wanted

Owning gold is my favorite way to benefit from the goofy problems caused by our feckless leadership. But another great opportunity is to go short long-term Treasury prices. Boring right? Hear me out.

I wouldn't be the first journalist or analyst to call shorting US Treasuries the trade of the decade. In fact, most if not all of my favorite gurus and market soothsayers have been making similar calls for years. Our own Andy Crowder used that exact phrase in November of 2011.

The Wall Street Journal had a similar piece around the same time - this time focusing on long-term German and French bonds. Bill Bonner over at the Daily Reckoning said something similar back in early 2010: "So there is our Trade of the Decade: Sell US Treasury debt/Buy Japanese stocks."

My former colleague Bud Conrad at Casey Research made a similar call in 2009

Below is a snapshot of the S&P 500 from December 19, 2011 to today:

December 19 is arguably the beginning of this latest bull-run in the broad stock market.

I understand that it's extremely difficult to think about stocks in terms of the long term. The fact is, most investors are incapable of thinking about stocks for any period longer than 3-6 months. That's the largest block of time they can conceptually understand or all they have the memory for.

And while I'm sure many investors have been and will continue to be lured into this market, we're still not in a long-term bull market for stocks.

That's because just 4 years ago, stocks were higher. And stocks were higher 12 years ago. That's not a sign of a robust bull market.

So what's going on? Here's something you won't hear anyone say: We are in a secular bear market

Gold sold off big Wednesday. It's not surprising, or even worrisome. Gold and silver WILL continue to experience periods of volatility, frequently to the downside.

But let me remind you: gold price movement tells us way more about the dollar over the short-term than it does about gold over the long-term. In other words, the fact that gold fell today just tells us that the dollar index rose.

You can see in this 6-month chart of both gold (in gold) and the US dollar index (in red) that gold and the dollar tend to move inversely to each other over the short term.

It's not a perfect correlation, but it's pretty reliable.

The dollar rose yesterday and today mostly because Ben Bernanke didn't announce further quantitative easing (AKA money printing). Apparently that's a good enough reason for the dollar to pop.

And yes, gold prices are falling.

But look at

On November 7, 2011 I wrote the following about platinum:

"Something strange is happening with the platinum market. Usually, platinum prices are higher than gold prices. But recently, it's been selling for LESS than gold.

Such an occurrence does not happen very often, and when it does, platinum usually spikes in the months following.

To show how infrequently it happens, I've posted a chart below which shows the price of gold divided by the price of platinum. Anytime this ratio is over 1 it means that platinum was cheaper than gold.

So only five times in the past 20 years has platinum been this cheap related to gold.

And now let's take a look at what happened to the price of platinum after the previous four occasions:

That's a solid trend: an average of 61.5% gains in 24 months. I expect we'll see

When you're invested in Junior resource companies, you have to look for the exception. It's the exception in this investing space that succeeds. It's the exception that isn't a total rip-off.

And sometimes the ONLY way you can succeed is by resisting every temptation, abandoning your initial instincts and heading completely away from the well-traveled road.

So instead of telling you about some high-flying gold or silver stock today - on the third and final day of the Prospectors & Developers Association of Canada (PDAC) conference - I'm going to tell you about an opportunity in possibly the most boring and ordinary mining story you're likely to find anywhere.

As I write this, most PDAC attendees are loading up on shares of super-risky micro-cap gold companies. Most of these investors will lose their shirts on these investments. A few of them will grow fabulously wealthy, only to blow their wealth

Analysts (most notably, CNBC analysts) are beginning to call for $5 gasoline to hit pumps by this summer. I don’t know if they will – but it’s certainly within the realm of possibility.

And though we’re still patting ourselves on the back here in the United States for increasing oil domestic oil output, the problem has little to do with oil supply, and everything to do with refinery capacity.

For significant periods of time, refineries have swung in between profitability and non-profitability. Though the politicians at the helm mean to “punish” oil companies with higher taxes, these taxes frequently hit the bottom line of refiners harder than anyone.

Refining is a costly business – not just because it’s heavily taxed at about 10% before a single barrel of gasoline is even sold, but because of the massive shipping, storage and actual product and refinery costs.

And though refining can

As part of my continued series on this world-gone-mad - I'd like to point out a commodity trend that simply doesn't make any sense.

For decades and in fact, for almost the entire history of the American stock market, commodities and the Dow Jones Industrial Average Index moved inversely to each other.

In other words, when stocks go up, commodities usually go down.

You've probably seen this chart - which shows the inverse relationship:

I've posted this chart probably a dozen times in the past few years.

And while it's somewhat out of date - until the past 18 months or so, this inverse trend between stocks and commodities was still pretty accurate.

But something happened over the last few years that has coupled nearly every asset together. Almost everything is correlated.

Here's the Dow again, charted alongside a commodity index for the past 2 years:

That's pretty remarkable correlation