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Friday reading

A short list of articles and interviews you might find interesting. These essays seem to have a common thread running through them. Lots of interesting thinking about the economy, commodities, and inflation. Have a look.

The Aden Sisters offer their analysis of "Gold's Mega Bull Market" at Kitco.com.

Kurt Richebacher gets to the bottom of supposed "global tightening" over at The Daily Reckoning UK. Do not be fooled by incremental rate hikes when money and credit conditions are easy like Sunday morning. Here's an excerpt from "A tightening farce":

It is, of course, perfectly true that monetary tightening impacts the economy and its inflation rates with a pretty long delay. The trouble in the US case is that there never was any monetary tightening. There were many small rate hikes, and the Greenspan Fed had probably hoped that the higher costs of borrowing would exert some restraint on credit demand. But it has not happened. It was a vain hope.

The fact is that the credit expansion has sharply accelerated during these two years of rate hikes instead of decelerating. During 2004, when the Fed started its rate hike cycle, total credit, financial and nonfinancial, expanded by $2,800.8 billion. In the first quarter of 2006, it expanded at an annual rate of $4,392.8 billion.

More from Marc Faber in this Moneycontrol.com interview transcript. Here, Faber addresses the idea of a slowdown in the US economy and how such an event might affect other economies across the globe, principally those of Asia. If you like what you read, be sure to see the sidebar of related articles (more info from Faber and Jim Rogers on Asian markets and commodities).

See also the many excellent articles currently on display at Safehaven.com. Peter Schiff gives us his two cents on the recent gold correction, while Doug Wakefield and Ben Hill offer up a realistic appraisal of Wall Street brokerage analysts and the "buy and hold" mantra in, "Please, Proceed to the Nearest Exit - Part 1". Be sure to look for the follow-up articles in this series as they appear.

And if that's not enough, you might want to have a glance at the interesting ruminations posted on Daily Speculations. All manner of topics covered here, from the risk profile of Steve Irwin's (Crocodile Hunter) career choice to academic studies on social networks, most of which are related back to the markets in some way.

Check out the site's reading list while you're there, you're sure to find some interesting picks.

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