ASAP

High-Yield Canadian Royalty Trusts: What's the Catch?

Following up on Blind Owl's comment about claiming the Foreign Tax Credit on U.S. returns, he is right about the "proportion" limitation of credit you get in any given year. However, any credit you are not allowed to claim is indefinitely carried forward for likely eventual use in future years, so it is not necessarily lost by any means. As for the complexity, the calculations do look arduous, making use of computerized tax software highly recommended.

Greenspan, Please, Retire Already!

Competence and discipline became "politically incorrect" and went out of fashion in America some time ago. We are now paying the price for this, and I am afraid it may only be the beginning.

'Gold as Money' Means a Potentially Massive Rise in Valuation

If push came to shove, why couldn't America's President pull a modern version of the FDR trick? ie., declare a "recall" all US citizens' gold and the gold from our ETF's, give us some arbitrary (low) amount of freshly printed paper dollars for it, then make it illegal to own/hold gold thereafter. After Fort Knox is replenished, the President can then officially devalue the currency to the point where an American gold standard might hold up going forward, debasing the paper dollars the government just gave us for our gold.

Natural Gas Inventories

How about charting the number of days' supply currently in storage rather than the absolute amount of gas? Annual increases in consumption makes the average 5-year or ten year absolute storage levels less relevant as a baseline reference.

Gold Is Just a Brick ('Active Value Investing' Book Excerpt)

I have come to believe that an unbacked, easily debasable fiat currency, in the hands of a government and/or central bank, is the equivalent of ABSOLUTE POWER in the hands of any human being or leadership structure. In a few circumstances, or for a period of time, temptation may be resisted and abuse of that absolute power avoided. Eventually, however, (at least long as human nature continues to exist) Lord Acton's dictum will prevail: "Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely."

The monetary and gold price events we are seeing unfold today are the beginning of the fallout of Acton's dictum having come to pass with regard to the world's "new age", and recently much-abused, paper currencies. The rate and extent of printing press abuse has been on the rise since 1995, and I currently see no credible reason to believe that any relief is on the horizon. If anything, the current trends may accellerate.

I am no conspiracy theorist or "survivalist"... but my sense is that the monetary genie is finally beginning to escape from the bottle, and that no one who is likely to be put in power by the American electorate will either be willing or able to effectively reverse this. Anything beyond just a temporary reversal would require a DRAMATIC (ie., Ron Paul or Milton Friedman style) and permanent change in behavior by both our government and the Fed, and quite possibly committing the American public to a painful, deflationary economic retrenchment beyond most anyone's voluntary ability to tolerate. I just do not see this happening pre-emptively in our current "pain-averse"... society. The abuse of our unbacked paper currency will not likely stop until there is simply no further abuse that can be wrung out of the system.

At the moment, only a limited number of people are openly decrying the "new clothes" of the fiat money "emperor" for what they really are (mainly just the unsophisticated, un-indoctrinated "children"). That trickle of un-influential, youthful humanity may one day become a powerful adult flood, however, which is when the world's most recent experiment with paper-only money will meet an ignominious and possibly very ugly end.