When push comes to shove, pistols with blanks are useless.

The same can be said about the ballooning ranks of economic dreamers -- those self-professed financial experts who keep pounding the table and tell us that we're out of the woods. One of their arguments -- which cannot be dismissed...

As westerns go, The Magnificent Seven, starring Yul Brenner, is one of my favorites, The film, which came out in 1960, centered on seven gunfighters hired by a Mexican village to get rid of a gang of bad guys.

Sam Stovall, the chief investment strategist of Standard & Poor's, has...

Hey, what's up with gold? Maybe it needs a flu shot, perhaps also one for swine flu.

After barreling ahead about 130% in the past five years, 29% in the past two years, busting through $1,000 an ounce last September and then tacking on another 20% from there, the investment...

Enough already of that steady stream of pie-in-the-sky comments from the Administration's team of economic dreamers.

The latest came this past weekend when Lawrence Summers, the White House's chief economic adviser, emphatically declared in a TV interview -- which was conspicuously devoid of any ifs, ands or buts -- that...

The brothers Grimm began spinning fairy tales in 1907. Now 102 years later, the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the government agency that doles out those closely watched monthly employment figures, seems to be giving the Grimms a run for their money.

In brief, the BLS is stacking the employment...

As the stories of the infidelity of golfing great Tiger Woods continue to mount -- the latest count is up to seven women who claim to have had affairs with him -- a media search is on for "the next Tiger Woods."

That is, for another well known supposedly...

We've all read pieces on how to save a buck. Here's one on how to save something far more valuable -- your life.

As everyone knows, a bum stock can bloody you financially, but bum eating is worse; it can kill you. Accordingly, what follows is a different kind of...

Even though securities industry regulators are on the warpath over what they perceive as illegal stock trading by Wall Street cheats, the practice of trying to make a fast, unlawful buck, nonetheless, continues to swell.

What follows is a number of examples, the most noteworthy one centering on the...

The art of being wise is the art of knowing what to overlook, philosopher William James wrote.

In this case, former Goldman Sachs' strategist, Fred Dickson, urged investors to overlook the market's sharp decline in response to the worrisome news that fast growing Dubai was seeking to delay payments...

'Tis the season to be jolly! Maybe so for you and me, but not so President Obama, who is in the 12th month of his new era of hope.

Why not him? Because even though the president was recently the beneficiary of a dose of good news on the...

Warning From The Planets: Watch Out!

We all know the bullish case for 2010 (an upswing in the economy). And we all know the bearish case (a double-dip recession), both of which I recently wrote about. Aside, though, from the bulls and bears, what about the...

Maybe I'll toast in the new year with beer, not champagne. Why so? Read on.

First, seeing is believing, not hearing is believing. It's worth keeping that in mind since with less than seven weeks to go before we're in 2010, you'll soon be bombarded in print and on TV...

Wild, off-the-wall gold forecasts -- some of which have proved to be anything but wild or off the wall -- are a dime a dozen. Here's one that floored me; maybe it'll floor you, too.

First, the last thing I want to do is sound like a broken record after...

How Sweet it is! Or maybe not.

That's a reference to an every day occurrence. In brief, some guy comes up with what he thinks is an ingenious product that's a far superior mousetrap to what's currently on the market. But skeptics ridicule the idea and the creator goes through...

If only Goldfinger had just waited

One of Edgar Allen Poe's most famous stories was The Gold-Bug. Written in 1843, it dealt with a man, William Legrand, who was deemed to be mentally ill because he was obsessed with finding gold after being bitten by the gold bug. He...

Hallelujah! The latest jobs numbers, though pretty darn ugly, are beginning to throw off some hopeful signs.

If you're skeptical, that's legitimate, since companies continue to chop their work force big time. The latest is Johnson & Johnson, which plans to slash 8,000 jobs. Further, Friday's release of October job...

Brett Favre, the aging 40-year-old quarterback of the Minnesota Vikings football team, proved to the rest of us Sunday that getting older doesn't mean you're losing it. To the contrary, demonstrating that novelist Thomas Wolfe was wrong in his belief that you can't go home again, the supposedly washed-up quarterback...

Go figure this crazy market following another bout of schizophrenia. Take last week, a week that may have flashed bum tidings ahead for investors, even the possibility of a selling panic. First came terrific Thursday, then wicked Friday, as big money was made and even bigger money was lost.

Most...

With Thanksgiving Day (November 26) less than a month away, let's talk turkey. No, not the turkey we can't wait to eat, but what some Wall Street professionals regard as the "economic turkeys."

They're the ones operating on the delusional premise that the recession is history and that by mid-2010...

Wall Street's bad guys could be at it again.

In this case, it's another potential significant insider trading scandal--one of several I've discovered that are under investigation.. The most recent one centers on one of the year's biggest and most publicized corporate acquisitions--personal computer giant Dell's $3.9 billion takeover...