The jobs data is strong!  Get out of bonds and into stocks!  The jobs data is weak!  Get out of stocks and run to bonds!  Wait, maybe it's both and money has to go somewhere!  Help!

This is the dilemma of investors today.  Interest rates are artificially low in stocks and bonds and the conventional wisdom is that money has to go somewhere so they all play a minute by minute guessing game about which way to go.  Best of all there is a class of analysts (root word "anal") that feed this daily frenzy - with gusto.  After all, if they admitted that they have no idea what is going to happen next, they would be out of a job and we can't have that, now can we?

For the rest of us out here in reality land, things continue to look dismal if you just take a step back and a deep breath.  The new jobs that are being created are from the government. Simply, no government job creates anything but paperwork, so it is a drain on the economy as it sucks taxes, debts, and or just prints money to pay all these suddenly necessary government workers.  Folks, when the typical government employee, who creates nothing, gets paid a third more than the typical private sector employee (who creates everything worthwhile), something is wrong and unsustainable.  You don't need a Harvard degree to understand this and clearly the president's own degree hasn't made him any smarter.

Stock prices are artificially high, driven by a bubble of hope on the part of traders that things are bound to get better.  Bond prices have nowhere to go but down, as interest rates rise to continue to attract foreign investors to finance our deficits.  Interest rates go up, bonds go down.  And gold is resuming its upward trend - as I told you all along it would.  The place to be is in gold and other precious metals and selected stocks of foreign countries denominated in currencies that are stronger than ours like those of Australia, Canada, and Denmark.  We live in a global economy so we had all better get used to using it to our own advantage.

Ignore the so-called experts that think recovery is on the way.  It's not.  The current stock market rally and seemingly better numbers are all built on hope and that is a mirage.  Hope is not a strategy.  Reality needs to be at the base of all of our reasoning to prosper in this new world we live in.  We are in what I would call the "willfully insane period" when hope is triumphing over reason, because to accept what is right in front of us is too darn scary for most folks.  We need to be brave and face the dragon.  Then we can win.