Here again, the long volatility ETFs are strictly for short-term traders, but the inverse volatility funds offer the same kinds of advantages for long-term short-sellers as the leveraged bullish bond ETFs. Think it through: You expect volatility to go up, so you short, or bet against, the inverse funds that want volatility to go down.

A handful of major banks sold gold futures contracts worth tens of billions of dollars on the Comex futures exchange, frequently at odd times when trading was thin. This pushed the “paper” price of gold through technical support levels, which activated sell programs of momentum-trading hedge funds. The resulting additional selling pressure forced

The world’s governments thus find themselves in an ever-shrinking box. And all it will take to trigger the crisis is a return to historically-normal levels of interest rates. As recently as 2000, 30-year Treasury bonds yielded over 6 percent and 30-year mortgages cost 7.5 percent. Let rates return to those levels and the global financial system

Ludwig von Mises, a pioneer in the Austrian School of economics, called this sudden loss of faith in a fiat currency a “crack-up boom,” and historically it has spelled the end of the currency in question.

A good resource for finding a dealer that is both reputable and reasonable is GoldPrice.org, http://www.goldprice.org, which compares prices across numerous dealers.

The Fear Index is useful to measure gold’s true value. The Index’s average over the near-century covered in the above chart is 7.09 percent, compared to 2.27 percent in late 2013, which indicates that gold is undervalued. To return to the ‘norm’ – perhaps not the right word since most of the data measures an era of fiat currency – that this

Are there financial indicators that can signal the advent of a crack-up boom? A few. Gold’s exchange rate is an obvious one. When it spikes, that’s a sign that global capital is losing faith in fiat currency – which explains why governments intervene in the precious metal markets so aggressively. Also potentially useful is the velocity of money.

Shortly after his inauguration in 1933, President Franklin Roosevelt concluded that US problems were serious enough to warrant devaluation of the dollar, among other aggressive policies. Under Article I, Section 8 of the Constitution, only Congress had the power to “regulate” 6 the relationship between the dollar and gold, but FDR claimed that

the Federal Reserve issued up to 2½-times more receipts than gold