Free Republic

Inflation in the 19 European countries that share the euro hit a 13-year high, challenging the European Central Bank’s (ECB) view that price pressures are largely benign and will soon fade. Consumer price inflation in the eurozone accelerated to 3.4 percent over the year in September, up from 3 percent a month earlier and 2.2 percent the month before that, according to Oct. 1 data (pdf) from Eurostat, the European Union’s statisics agency. That’s the highest reading since September 2008 and slightly ahead of analyst forecasts of 3.3 percent. A surge in energy costs was behind the bulk of the...

Every day is a good day to buy gold of late. It's an intoxicating state of affairs for those of us who already own the barbaric metal, which is exactly the problem. Being inordinately giddy over an investment, what Tony Montana called "getting high on your own supply", generally ends quite poorly. The question isn't so much whether or not gold has worked. It has. The question is if it's too late to enter or if this is a prudent time to take some profits. With the fundamentals widely understood, Breakout turned to technical analyst Peter Lee of UBS to...

One of my clients called today to ask what he could do to protect himself against hyper-inflation. With the Democrats in congress and Team Obama using trillions as counters and billions as rounding errors, that concern is spreading. And it's a very good question. Let's use the experience of Germany during its experience during the early 1920s. Germany was a first-world country that was dealt hyper-inflation as a deliberate policy. Here’s Art Cashin: Originally, on this day (-2) in 1922, the German Central Bank and the German Treasury took an inevitable step in a process which had begun with their...