Rash of retirements put Social Security on the brink (USA Today)
America’s #1 Creditor has the ultimate weapon (NY Post)
Recession chugs on, except for government (Wash Examiner)
How a new jobless era will transform America (Atlantic)
China buying gold and oil ETFs (Bloomberg)
The year of the coupon (NYT)

According to the WSJ, hedge fund extraordinaire Paulson is having trouble lining up investors for his anticipated “gold fund”.  After making a killing betting on a housing crash, you’d think maybe people would buy into Paulson’s macro-economic views and corresponding investments.
From my point of view, this should prove that gold is not a bubble or anywhere near a bubble.  There are still entirely too many investors not interested in investing in gold.  A bubble, on the other hand, would have everyone from your lawn man to your taxi driver buying …

This guest post was submitted by Shaun Connell, a gold coins investor. To learn more about gold, check out his guide on buying gold coins.
If you’re interested in writing a guest post for 20smoney.com, see the guidelines here.
Making the big decision to invest in gold is only the first step, especially if you’re talking about investing in gold coins. Luckily for gold investors today, it’s pretty easy to get involved in this process.
In the past, you had to go out and find an individual seller of gold coins or …

Fiat currency critics often talk about the race to the bottom meaning the competitive devaluations of currencies in order to stimulate exports and “growth”.  Today, we saw a form of a bailout of Greece (or at least the rumors of one) by Germany and maybe a few others.  Germany, being a major export economy is happy with a weak Euro.  But, weak against what?  If the U.S. dollar is turning to crap at the same time, doesn’t the Euro need to be weakened even further?  It’s a compettive downward cycle.  …

From my perspective, the “recovery” seems to be confined mostly to the large Corporations.  Companies like Cisco (CSCO), McDonalds (MCD) , Pfizer (PFE), etc. all are coming out with decent earnings.  Furthermore, even companies that have major issues ahead (in my opinion) such as Brunswick Corporation (BC) (boat manufacturer) and Simon Property Group (SPG) (commercial real estate) are able to stay afloat due to their ability to get financing.  You can also add a number of large U.S. banks to such a list.
Large Corporations are able to sell shares to …

To start this article, let me say that I’m 100% a capitalist.  I believe it is the best economic way that the most people gain the most.  I believe in the power of millions of individuals making individual decisions versus central economic planning.  With that said, in this system the rich always get richer.  Many of you will use that as the reason why capitalism is bad.  But, why is this a negative result?  I don’t think it is.  Let me explain further.
You Need Capital To Make Money
In capitalism, capital …

If your remember the image a while back showing why we’re not going to have a long lasting bull market moving forward, there were a number of indicators that were headwinds for a prolonged bull market.  Two of the headwinds were consumer credit levels and savings rate.  The image in the above post says that consumer credit levels are way too high and will be falling moving forward; likewise, the savings rate will be rising moving forward.
We now have the 11th straight month of falling consumer credit.  This definitely coincides …

The real estate game has changed.  A few years ago, the equation was simple: put as much money into your house as possible because each dollar was multiplied when selling your property.  Nowadays, you need to be smart and frugal with putting money into your home.  The new equation, post-housing-bust, is as follows:
Put As Little Money As Possible Into Your House Towards Differentiating, Value-Added Projects
If you look at that equation, there are two goals: differentiation and adding value.  With regards to differentiation, you want to be able to differentiate your …