Remember what we're looking at. Gold is a currency. It is still, by all evidence, a premier currency, that no fiat currency, including the dollar, can match.

I believe that the general growth in large [financial] institutions have occurred in the context of an underlying structure of markets in which many of the larger risks are dramatically -- I should say, fully -- hedged.

When trust is lost, a nation's ability to transact business is palpably undermined.

There is no evidence that the business cycle has been repealed.

Without calling the overall national issue a bubble, it's pretty clear that it's an unsustainable underlying pattern.

A decline in the national housing price level would need to be substantial to trigger a significant rise in foreclosures, because the vast majority of homeowners have built up substantial equity in their homes despite large mortgage-market financed withdrawals of home equity in recent years.

We need, in effect, to make the phantom 'lock-boxes' around the trust fund real.