The last hurrah

As shares in banks and insurance companies do a new nose dive, we have to ask: is this the beginning of the next leg down in the recession?

Banks, crippled and recrippled, will be in no position to lend. The government’s next logicl step is to send everyone with a Social Security number a check for $100k.

Gold, which has for weeks traded in sync with shares, seem to be decoupling and trading up as equities drop.

Is “the market” — a billion intuitions and actions distilled into a sequence of decisions and prices — realizing that inflation is the only way out of this mess? In theory, it should take years for this kind of scenario to play out, but gold’s price bears watching.