I just accepted a job offer today and start next week. In a few months I'll have to decide if and how much money to invest into a 401K and I'm wondering if it would just be dumping money into a bottomless pit.

What are some good sites/resources for helping me make that decision?

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"What you think you thought you saw you did not see." Agent J, MiB - Manhatten Bureau

According to the current wisdom at the banks, you would do well to short gold - personally I would think you do well to go long on gold.

I always found the motley fool website had some good advice. Certainly one of the best sites for the retail level investor - If you have the option getting your money into Euros, or even Canadian dollars might be an idea...

The house of cards has to crash sometime. It is just a matter of time...

PS. Congrats on the Job!!!

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Gone Sailing

From Motley Fool regarding gold prices and india:

Gold remains a coiled Spring

Barker has set a target price of $2000 for gold.

Can you believe banks were shorting it? Sounds like some very uncomfortable positions

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Gone Sailing

In inflation adjusted terms, the peak price of a gold back in '79 or in the oil shock/stagflation mess of the 70s comes to *$2200* in today's dollars. It hit nearly $1100 today, which is a record in nominal terms, but just half of the true peak in real terms.

So based on that, $2000 would not be as crazy high as it seems.


-Richard

What is crazy is someone taking a short position on it. I will assume that some technical analysis said it was overvalued (at $1000) so therefore it should be shorted....

Then it goes up to $1100.... And I am sure there are people who are now saying that $1100 is over valued (and they may be right - or they may be very expensively wrong...)

It might just be that this is one case (where gold is completely decoupled from the greater US economy) where gold might actually BE a good hedge against an instable economy.... In which case $2200 is probably a very low target price ... At this rate it could hit that before the close of the year - considering gold was $700 in May.

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Gone Sailing

Interesting full page advert in the paper
today. "U.S. GOV'T GOLD"..."Public Release".

£780.00 for ten coins ($5 Gold Eagle), plus
shipping & insurance.

I would be interested if I were younger but
there is not much fun in them I think. Might
look pretty hanging on the wall I suppose.

Looks like a good sized spoke in the gold
market though

No, most definitely it is not.

DX seems to have really calmed down - no wild swings - just trading in a tight range at 75.7 +/- 0.05

The only problem with the DX chart is it doesn't give you volumns - so you can't tell if it is flat because no one is trading - or there are huge volumns with a great deal of stability.

DX - Three Day

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Gone Sailing

Oh, for some reason I thought you were an American.

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"What you think you thought you saw you did not see." Agent J, MiB - Manhatten Bureau

Thanks, I think I'll see how the fund is doing. I suppose it might make money in a down market, but most people I know have seen theirs decline.

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"What you think you thought you saw you did not see." Agent J, MiB - Manhatten Bureau

Well, with all the other big news you may not have seen it, but the official unemployment rate shot up through 10% and now stands at 10.2%.
U-6, the broadest measure and the closest to the way they used to measure it stands at 17.5%. So we've reached that double digit threshold.

The dollar started swinging again.


-Richard

When was the official method of computing unemployment changed?

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I may have many faults, but being wrong ain't one of them. -- Jimmy Hoffa

It's been slowly changed over the years, starting in the 80s, I think. They make little tweaks to the statistical models all the time. This is a complex subject. The BLS will strongly defend its methods, and its critics will strongly attack them.

Besides employment data, there are similiar controversies about all govt. economic statistics, GDP and inflation being the most important.

Case in point is inflation, through the CPI numbers. Back in the 90s, they made some changes to that which resulted in lower inflation numbers. The reason, well I should say the alleged reason, was Social Security COLAs. They didn't have the guts to actually lower the COLAs, but if they could get the inflation numbers to be a bit lower, it would have the same effect. There was a story that the head of the agency (BEA, or BLS) was told by high ranking congressmen that it would be nice if they could get the inflation numbers lower. It would save a lot of money, and some of those savings could go to the budgets of the agencies involved. Wink, wink.

Politicians like rose colored glasses.


-Richard

Well, gold did break $1100 today, hitting $1102. It dropped back down below that and is trading some in the high $1090s right now.

And the latest Helicopter (Fed) data is out, and sure enough M0 (monetary base) broke the $2T level:



And reserves are well over $1T:



-Richard

I wish it was that low here. We're over 15% U-3.

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"What you think you thought you saw you did not see." Agent J, MiB - Manhatten Bureau

Thanks Richard. I did a little reading, and unemployment *is* a pretty complex subject.

I graduated college in 1982, which was a bad time to find a job. Interestingly, it didn't seem quite as bad as it does now, despite unemployment being higher at that time. I guess the economy has changed over the years, as has my perception of it.

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I may have many faults, but being wrong ain't one of them. -- Jimmy Hoffa

I'd have thought that my spelling would give it away, but no, I'm British.

Oh boy, it looks like the Primary Dealers are trying to essentially *extortl* the Fed into easing their leverage limits (lowering their required capital ratios) again.

As the FRED graph above shows, M0 has shot through the roof, thanks to hall of Helicopter, nay Weimar Ben's printing. That is like gasoline and when the spark goes off, we get an inflationary conflagration. Helicopter desperately needs to suck all that printed money back out of the system when there's the slightest hint of inflation. But he's got himself in a fine mess because he's pumped it up so much, the traditional ways of pulling it out aren't so effective. Someone described it as trying to put toothpaste back in the tube.

If you remember, a while back I posted about the Fed trying to some test reverse repos, and those tests failed. That is, if need be, they were going to try to suck hundreds of billions of M0 back out by doing massive reverse repos. The small scale test didn't work.

Well, turns out the TBTFs that are also primary dealers (the ones blessed with the authority to deal directly with the Fed and who must participate in Uncle T auctions) are the ones balking. They now say they won't cooperate unless the Fed raises their leverage limits. IOW, give us what we want or we don't cooperate in keeping inflation from exploding.

http://www.zerohedge.com/article/rev...tal-requiremen

And Denninger just wrote about it:

http://market-ticker.org/archives/15...The-Banks.html

Actually, ZeroHedge really believes all this is just a sham, the Fed trying to make it look like it's really working hard to clamp down on inflation and run a tight monetary ship for the benefit of China and other foreign creditors when they really have no intention much less the ability to draw down all the monetary dysentary they've unleashed.


-Richard

Heh, heh -- here's another good one that just broke:

http://business.timesonline.co.uk/to...cle6907889.ece

Lloyd's, which now owns HBOS, is being kept afloat by 165B pounds of secret loans by the UK govt. Lloyd's admits it would face "materially higher refinancing risk" were it not for the state support. Translation: we couldn't refinace our debt and would blow up otherwise.

The telling thing is to look at this relative to the size of the UK economy etc. That figure is over $4K pounds per Brit taxpayer, I think.


-Richard

Oh BTW, I forgot to mention. Five more banks went belly up this FDIC Friday (Nov. 6th).


-Richard

Asian markets have been going for a while. The dollar is diving again, and gold just hit nearly $1106.


-Richard

Wot?!...certainly not a form of "cheap debt", I trust...

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*

They weren't actually loans to Lloyds, but loans to HBOS which Lloyds later took over.

That's a very different thing.

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‘To those who regard “crime fiction” as some sacred icon which must follow a rigid formula, I will always be the man who writes 18-syllable haiku.’Trying to make sense of computers, The Error Log.

Well, the inverse dollar-dow behavior continues. The dollar dived last night, dipping below 75.0 twice, before coming back up and bouncing between 75.0 and 75.1. And gold hit $1112.


-Richard

You know, sometimes I just have these "stop world, I want to get off" moments at just how crooked our "system" is. Here's some more Bezzle, Pharma Bezzle in particular:

http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?p...nYxCGoA&pos=10

Pfizer will pay the biggest criminal fine in US history, $1.2B, for off-label marketing of a drug (they tell -- even bribe -- doctors a drug is good for something it's not approved for, often with negative patient care outcomes). Note, in 2004 they plead guilty to doing it and promised never to do it again, all the while still doing it.

The general counsel for the company back in 2004 who was over all those agreements went on to become CEO, *and has now recently been appointed to the board of the NY Federal Reserve*.

Read that article carefully. It will get your blood boiling at just how crooked the whole system is. The Feds are reluctant to go the full monty against the big companies and charge them with felonies and put them in jail. Why? Well, it's similiar reasoning as "Too Big To Fail". If they prosecuted some Pharma outfit to the full extent of the law, it would ruin the shareholders as the stock would go to zero and cause too much economic trouble. Too Big to Go to Jail.


-Richard

And here's another one in the Lies, Damned Lies and then there's Statistics dept. that we've been discussing here:

http://finance.yahoo.com/banking-bud...&asset=&ccode=

This was a conference about how current statistical methods overstate economic growth and productivity. But hey, maybe it's not a bug, but a "feature".


-Richard

Denninger wrote a piece today about the market and the dollar:

http://market-ticker.org/archives/16...-Recovery.html


Note the near perfect negative correlation between the dollar and the S&P, even at the daily level of today.

-Richard

Hi Richard - More on the gold rush: From the New York Times

Gold Frenzy

Minor point - they maintain the adjusted to todays dollars the price of gold just needs to hit $1800 to reach an all time high. Either way the forcast seems to be a $2000 target. So dump dollars and Bonds - buy gold...

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Gone Sailing

That is probably some difference in the inflation index being used. I've seen similiar discrepancies and that's what it usually is.


-Richard

Here we go:

http://inflationdata.com/inflation/i...tion_chart.htm


The peak price of gold in 1980 comes to $2189 in 2009 dollars according to that. However, the *average* 1980 price comes to $1732 in today's dollars.

The average may be where the Times is getting their $1800 figure.


-Richard