Not even the nation's vast endowment with oil could save Venezuela's socialist economy from ending up where socialism always ends up: economic calculation has become increasingly difficult, which has made it nigh impossible for entrepreneurs to plan production in a rational manner. Consequently shortages of all sorts of goods have begun to crop up.

According to its latest publicly available filings, Soros Fund Management has increased its put position on the SPX (or rather, the SPX ETF SPY) to the second-highest level ever.

It is well known by now that the two most recent payroll report misses were due to the bad weather that economists and economic forecasters apparently failed to notice.

In our last update on technical conditions in the gold market posted on Monday, we discussed the potential for a breakout in both gold and gold stocks. This breakout has subsequently come to pass.

There are many perma-bulls out there who are hailed as prescient 'bottom callers' in the media, but if you're bullish all the time, you simply can't miss eventual bottoms.

Recently debates over minimum wage laws have flared up. There can not actually be any controversy over the basic economic laws involved, and yet the debate continues to be revived again and again...

When we last wrote about Canada and the worrisome expansion of its household debt stock and real estate bubble, we noted that there was a lot of misguided optimism regarding the durability of these trends – mainly as a result of their durability up to this point.

One market observer recently commented that 'the more often gold bumps against this resistance level without breaking though, the more likely a sell-off becomes'. We actually tend to think that the opposite is the case.

“India has always been a very corrupt place. It's the only way to get anything done." Yet since the new anti-corruption laws were passed, the economy has suffered. Is it possible that it wasn't corruption that hurt the Indian economy, but the lack of it?

“On any list of banking accidents waiting to happen, China is assured a place at the very top. But could a crash there take the entire global economy down with it?"

In the EU, data are stored by ISPs and mobile phone carriers for a time period of six months. A Green Party politician in Germany, Malte Spitz, has sued his carrier Deutsche Telekom for his own data after it refused to release them to him voluntarily. After he won the suit, he published the data which you can see here.

The Greek government is intent on smothering its reluctant creditors with good news (in order to be able to accumulate a reasonable amount of such, the last 'troika' assessment has apparently been subject to numerous delays):

Whenever the stock market begins to correct from a position that exhibits what John Hussman calls the “overvalued, overbought and over-bullish” syndrome, it is worth studying the reaction of market participants to the decline.

The recent EM currency crisis may bring European bank worries to the fore again. The total exposure of these banks to emerging markets amounts to well over $3 trillion. Euro zone banks have some 70% of their capital and reserves at risk. The average of loans outstanding that have become non-performing in past EM crises amounted to 40% of all loans

There have been small moves in EM currencies on Monday, but charts comparing the Argentine peso, the South African Rand, and the Turkish lira to the U.S. dollar are ominous.

Pater Tenebrarum explains why he is optimistic about gold, despite the near universal negative gold sentiment in the media.