Europeans, with hundreds of years (and wars) more experience than North Americans in weathering the vagaries of financial uncertainty, have driven gold to new highs in sterling (£661.55) and euros (€701.55). (Rubles too, no doubt.) The FT reports.

The total amount of gold held by the world’s gold ETFs last week rose for the first time above the 40m ounce level. Together, such investment vehicles are now the largest holders of physical gold after the official reserves of the US, Germany, the International Monetary Fund, France and Italy.

“The aggressive appreciation in the ETF contracts … is the clearest signal to date this year that gold is one of the limited assets that investors want exposure to during these frantic times,” Ms Tully said.

John Reade, a precious metal strategist at UBS in London, added that the change in ETF gold holdings so far this month, at plus 2.5m ounces, was “impressive”, but he warned that the figure fell short of the 6m ounces achieved in mid-October, following the collapse of Lehman Brothers.

ETF Securities, which provides commodity-based exchange-traded funds, said it saw record inflows last week, with $500m invested in its products in just two days.

From AFP:

France will offer all 18-year-olds a free daily copy of the newspaper of their choice, President Nicolas Sarkozy said Friday, announcing a package of measures to help the beleaguered press.

In addition to the free paper scheme, Sarkozy announced plans to double the government’s budget for buying advertising in the press, a freeze on the cost of postal distribution and a reduction in payroll taxes for newsagents.

Nominations are in and now it’s time to vote for the fourth and ultimate Suxorz panelist.

Vote here!

For those of you who’ve forgotten, Suxorz is the panel I’m moderating at SXSW Interactive ’09. Here’s the description SXSW’s site (tweaked):

Bring popcorn and rotten tomatoes! Braving hate-mail from last year’s “winners,” the Suxorz ’09 panel returns to dissect the ten worst social media and web 2.0 ad campaigns of the year. Together, we’ll shame the marketers who abuse people-powered media.

Everyone on the ballot was nominated through the Suxorz Facebook page and has affirmed their willingness to participate.

Write a blog post, call grandma, twitter your kids, or tell your neighbor to vote & and we’ll release results Friday!

Bloomberg reports: “The hedge-fund industry shrank by about a fifth to $1.5 trillion at the end of the year from a peak of $1.9 trillion, Eurekahedge said.”

Since most hedge funds charge 2% of assets under management and 20% of profits, that amounts to at least a $10 billion decline in hedge fund fees.

That’s $10 billion a year less for yachts, Dalton/Spence/Chapin tuitions, fourth homes in Telluride, donations to eccentric causes, Greenwich McMansions, Lear Jets, trips to Venice. Gosh, where did it all go?

To put $10 billion in perspective, that’s roughly half the total online advertising market in ’07… money that went to pay thousands of journalists, bloggers, webmasters, hosts, programmers, ad mongers, server manufacturers, and, yes, a few media moguls who live in Greenwich.

History of the Internet from PICOL on Vimeo.

On Twitter, Salim says: “the French are the only people who will say “it works in practice, but will it work in theory?”

Wonderful to see Sarah Palin, protesting that she reads lots more “publications” than Couric and everybody else gives her credit for, still ducks and dodges before she finally chokes out USA Today and NYT. Fast forward to 3.30 if you can’t stomach the rest.

And wonderful to see that male and female mosquitoes harmonize at 400 and 600 hertz (a perfect fifth) before tossing in a harmonic at 1200 hertz. Here’s the full NPR story, including a guest appearance by Barry Manilo.

The cobbler’s kids never have shoes, and our blog has been without comments for months, with the fix always in a queue behind more lucrative work.

Welcome back, commenters!

Excellent analysis but grim news for print-lovers from Michael Hirschorn in the Atlantic:

Regardless of what happens over the next few months, The Times is destined for significant and traumatic change. At some point soon—sooner than most of us think—the print edition, and with it The Times as we know it, will no longer exist. And it will likely have plenty of company. In December, the Fitch Ratings service, which monitors the health of media companies, predicted a widespread newspaper die-off: “Fitch believes more newspapers and news­paper groups will default, be shut down and be liquidated in 2009 and several cities could go without a daily print newspaper by 2010.”

…

Most likely, the interim step for The Times and other newspapers will be to move to digital-only distribution (perhaps preserving the more profitable Sunday editions). Already, most readers of The Times are consuming it online. The Web site, nytimes.com, boasted an impressive 20 million unique users for the month of October, making it the fifth-ranked news site on the Internet in terms of total visitors. (The October numbers were boosted by interest in the election, but still …) The print product, meanwhile, is sold to a mere million readers a day and dropping, and the Sunday print edition to 1.4 million (and also dropping). Print and Web metrics are not apples-to-apples, but it’s intuitively the case that the Web has extended The Times’ reach many times over.

The conundrum, of course, is that those 1 million print readers, who pay actual cash money for the privilege of consuming the paper, and who are worth about five figures a page to advertisers, are far more profitable than the 20 million unique Web users, who don’t and aren’t. Common estimates suggest that a Web-driven product could support only 20 percent of the current staff; such a drop in personnel would (in the short run) devastate The Times’ news-gathering capacity.