Of all the major disasters and threats to your security ahead — and all the major profit opportunities — three stand out as the most imminent of all: Disaster #1: America’s Empire of Debt. If you think Americans are living a normal life, think again. Our entire consumer economy, lifestyle, livelihood — and nearly all or wealth — is predicated on one thing: DEBT.

THE PRICE OF GOLD continued Tuesday's late rally this morning in London, rising 1.6% from yesterday's 1-month low vs. the Dollar as world stock markets, government bonds and commodities held flat.

Gold dipped quickly in early US trading yesterday to $1,108.00/oz before recovering to close down 0.12%. It has range traded from $1,122/oz to $1,126/oz so far in Asian trading this morning. Gold has risen and is currently trading at $1,125.50/oz and in euro and GBP terms, gold is trading at €829/oz and £756/oz respectively.

Martin Hutchinson writes: If you're a U.S. investor, you can't be happy about the prospects for your portfolio. After all, you're mostly trapped in an economy with a gigantic and dangerous financial-services sector, a central bank that can't stop itself from printing money and a government that overspends wildly.

The volume of share trading for key index funds is going down while the price is going up.  Should we say the smart money is quietly accumulating shares, or should we say that the smart money is on the sidelines while the dumb money pushes prices higher?

In one of our previous essays we mentioned that the situation in the USD Index appears bearish, but it has not been the main driver of the PM prices lately. It's been the general stock market that used to drive gold and silver prices lately, which means that the situation is now less than perfectly bullish, especially in the short term.

We last wrote about Petropavlovsk back in December 09. Back then we noted the unusual selling of shares from Peter Hambro and Pavel Maslovsky, the two directors. Last week one of our readers drew our attention to the fact we’ve not spoken about them for a while. Fear not, they have been on our radar and as of last week fresh news caught our interest.

We finally saw the market pull back some late today as those high RSI readings kicked in. It wasn't the type of selling that says the market is doomed from here because that's not likely the case at all. When markets get overbought they need to unwind so you have to look at the selling that takes place more as an opportunity rather than a it's all over for the market type of situation. Selling is never fun if you have a long bias and it doesn't take very much selling to kick fear in pretty hard. Again, greed is easy. Fear is a tough son of a gun. With the late day selling we saw some of the 60-minute charts do quite a bit of unwinding although by no means should that selling be totally over. We can try to grind higher again but upside will be very tough indeed for the very short-term.

The US economy continues to make a slow recovery. The blizzards and unusually low temperatures that hit several regions in February hurt several areas, the Federal Reserve said in a Beige Book report last week.

The heads of Germany, France and Greece are continuing to highly vocally blame financial speculators for Greece's debt financing woes. This clearly amounts to political propaganda in an attempt to ms-direct the eyes of their electorate away from those culpable in bringing the crisis about against rising debt financing and insurance costs which is a SYMPTOM of the crisis and not its cause.