Friday Morning Roundup

I’m busy getting ready for my trip to Vancouver and the 2009 Vancouver Resource Investment Conference this weekend.  So I’ll keep this brief.

First, a chart of Agnico-Eagle Mines (AEM: 60.81 -0.90 -1.46%).  This will be of interest to my Red-Hot Global Small-Caps subscribers as well as anyone who bought by “Golden Parachute for 2009″ report …

 Gold Hits 3-Week High on Safe-Haven Demand Gold has breached well above its 200-day moving average against both the euro and the dollar, but the metal remains 11% lower than its 200-day moving average in yen terms. “Since there remains ample upside in yen terms, Japanese investors may deem this as an opportunity to drive up the metal to next key targets, thus prompting global investor demand further higher,” one analyst said.

In other new, I was just on the radio talking to The Big Money Show out of Denver Colorado and promised to put up a chart of vehicle miles driven year over year … which right now are falling off a cliff.  Here you go …

Source: http://www.calculatedriskblog.com/

Briefly, the decline in miles driven is worse than during the early ’70s and 1979-1980 oil crisis. Miles driven in November 2008 were 5.4% less than November 2007, so the YoY change in the rolling average may get worse.

Now for a few Weekend ReadingLinks …

Macroblog takes  a look at charts showing Presidents and where they started with GDP, unemployment, CPI and industrial production.  Needless to say, President Obama has his work cut out for him.  The charts are eye-popping.   Here is one …

Now take a look at the rest.

Here are three (probably) good books about how Wall Street Bankers got us into the mess we’re in.  The details in the book review alone will set your teeth on edge. 

It turns out the NSA spied on everyone  — EVERYONE — during the Bush administration.  Who could have predicted that if you lifted the restraints on America’s internal spying apparatus, they would suddenly turn into the KGB?  Well, just about everyone to the left of Pat Buchanan could have predicted it, but we were written off as fools and liars by the mainstream media.  Now, I predict a boom for security software.

Finally, in a lighter note, apparently, some dung beetles are sick of eating crap and have decided to turn carnivore.  It’s evolution in action.  Fascinating.  Go, beetles!  Make sure you get a cool new name. I’d suggest Velociraptor Beetle.  That’ll get you more respect at the bug club.

That’s it for this Friday. The broad indices are down, oil is sliding and gold and the dollar are up.  We’ll see where we go from here.

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