Out Of Bondage

Last week, U.S. Global’s Tadas Misiunas and I spent some time with financial advisors from Florida, providing an update on natural resources investments. Many asked why global resources were significantly lagging the overall S&P 500 Index.

By Doug Cronk:Getting individual investors to engage in the investment policy and asset allocation process remains a major challenge. For many individual investors (and their advisors), there might be a shortcut. Individual Investors could mimic institutional investors and use pension plan portfolios as a guide when constructing and maintaining the core of their own investment portfolio. Individual investors can leverage institutional investors' resources and planning work … for free.

An indigenous community in the Ecuadorian Amazon has won a reprieve after building up an arsenal of spears, blowpipes, machetes and guns to fend off an expected intrusion by the army and a state-run oil company.

It’s the start of a new year and a natural time to try to do things better. Although I don’t make resolutions, I do jot down a list of goals that I’d like to achieve at the start of each year. So maybe I do make resolutions. (Are goals resolutions?) However you want to define it, I’m always up for being a better me.

By John Slater:Newt Gingrich and Bill Clinton are quick to remind us that twenty years ago they lifted America from the depths of recession, initiating an unprecedented period of prosperity, jobs growth and balanced budgets. Sounds nice, but what if the America of today bears a closer relationship to 1972 than 1992?

Italy's Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi's days are numbered. He will likely be gone in a week. When it happens it will be a case of 2 down with Merkozy (France and Germany), Spain, and Portugal (thus 4) to go.

David Moenning submits: Something happened in the stock market last week that hasn’t occurred in nearly two months – it went down. Granted, one does have to look fairly closely at the chart of the S&P 500 to see that the result on the week was actually negative. Oh, and in the case of the Dow Jones Industrial Average, there actually wasn’t a decline at all as the venerable index simply pushed on to an eighth straight weekly gain.

Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin said on Thursday that Russia would not lift its temporary ban on grain exports until after next year's harvest."I believe it's necessary to note that we will only be able to consider lifting the grain export ban after the next year's harvest has been reaped," Putin told a government meeting in televised remarks.A record drought has destroyed a quarter of Russia's harvest this summer and Putin signed a decree in early August introducing a ban on grain exports from August 15 to December 31.