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THE TRUTH MUST BE IN HERE SOMEWHERE

"Stocks End First Positive Year Since 1999"
"Dollar Trims Losses After Record Lows"
"Year's Big Rally Helps Investors Regain Ground"
"Wall Street ends 3-year losing spell"
"The key to Wall Street's comeback"
"Profit-taking stalls Wall Street's end-of-year bull run"
"Finally, a year to really cheer about"
"Stocks rally"

Judging from those New Year headlines, you'd think the US economy has put the pits behind it and made a remarkable comeback, yet nary a mention of the de facto fact (as opposed to media artifact) that gold, the thermometer of a healthy economy, has hit a 14-year high of $417 and is still climbing (both gold and silver are up over 30%), while everything else has been sinking or at best treading water with "profits" diluted by inflation or debt, while for the past seven months corporate insiders have been dumping stock at more than a 20-to-1 ratio... can't help but wonder why none of that is mentioned anywhere in the major media (owned largely by Republicans), while debt-saddled US taxpayers foot the rocketing Bush bills with their jobless income and their sons, in a scenario worthy of Orwell...

As Bill Bonner of The Daily Reckoning puts it,

"The huge burst of government spending and additional debt did manage to hold off the day of reckoning... at least for a while. George W. Bush still has a shot at another term. Alan Greenspan is not yet regarded as the mountebank he really is. Americans are deeper in debt than ever... and going bankrupt at the fastest rate ever in history... but seem perfectly happy to do so!

So, it worked! The bubble was successfully reloaded. Investors can now buy stocks for more they are worth... and ruin themselves by borrowing for less than the real cost of money."


Another year of head-shaking...