(If you're a "Gold Bug", read below for why I think you're nutty to hold metals - there's a better play if you believe in hyperinflation.) Unresolved. Gold, I note, hit $1,000/oz and has come back in - there are many predicting $1600 "imminently" but they've been doing so since January and so far, are dead flat wrong. We will see.

Debt will be paid down when possible and when not, defaulted. This, of course, prevents deploying capital towards consumption and production. Expect this to show up in the first quarter in ways that cannot be refuted, and for the market to “get it” some time before the end of the second quarter. Looks like the "get it" has just started. CHECK.

Commercial Real Estate will collapse. The leverage in these deals has actually exceeded that in residential, if you can believe it. This will prove to have been totally insane and the losses taken there will be immense. It will also put a fork into the “this is contained” thesis, and validate the fact that generally, commercial R/E lags residential by 12-18 months. Guess what – time’s up! Price declines reported for the first time on these; this is starting!

Business CapEx will slow precipitously and may go negative. This will be “spun” for the first quarter or so, but by the middle of the second quarter it won’t be able to be spun any more, and the truth will have to be faced. That “truth time” will likely mark the start of the second big leg down in the equity markets. CHECK; see Network Appliance (Nasdaq: NTAP) and others. This story is just getting started.

The Dollar will bounce all over before starting to take off when it becomes apparently that the rest of the world is going to get it worse than we will. Not yet and may be way early; I now think we may see the 60s before this occurs.

The “market callers” who are (almost to a man!) calling for big moves northward in 2008 will be coming to the public “hat in hand” as we get into the latter part of the year. These people will be roundly discredited and yet another wave of so-called “analysts” will disappear from the scene, along with all the money the chumps who listened to them lost. Dick Bove anyone? Check; first of many.

I count six "Checks", five unresolved, and a couple that look at this point to be clean misses. I'll take it, given where we are. We'll do this again in December as a full recap; it should be fun.

How about these two video segments from CNBC Friday? Argue with these folks at your considerable peril - Mr. Walker is the former Comptroller General of the United States; he resigned earlier this year due to our government's refusal to deal with these issues.

http://www.cnbc.com/id/15840232?video=751583439
http://www.cnbc.com/id/15840232?video=751573252

Now let's take a look at Financial Sense and their article flow this weekend. Virtually every article there is now crowing about how Gold and Silver are going to the moon and complaining about blatant market manipulation of the price. Uh huh. Ok. Tell 'ya what - you buy a futures contract for delivery of either Gold or Silver, hold to expiration, and when the time comes, take delivery.

Come talk to me if the delivery fails. Until then I refuse to entertain this nonsense about how "there is some great cartel suppressing the price."

I'll tell you what's going on - the great "market callers-cum-dealers" were buying with both fists as Gold went to and through $1,000/oz, expecting to see the much-promised $1,600 immediately.

They intended to profit from an engineered squeeze northward as their "news articles" continued to pump the price, then sell that stock to you instead of acting as an intermediary. The spread wasn't good enough - greed got involved just like it did with real estate.

Now that the price has come down suddenly supply has "disappeared" from dealer shelves. But is it really gone?

Or is the truth that having failed in their prognostication and stuck with the inventory, now at a mark-to-market loss, the dealers are trying to provoke a buying panic among retail customers to drive the price back up?

Gee, I wonder.

The Commodities Futures market tells the truth, because it is a regulated entity and fails there get immediate attention. Show me the fails and I'm all ears. Until you do I call horsecrap on the "manipulation" claim.

Oh, and don't bother with the claptrap about the singular nickel failure on the LME a while back. Yes, it happened, but there was a penalty rate impose of 1% per day on the failure to deliver until you made good. I don't know about you, but an annualized return of 365% sounds pretty damn good to me, and those failures resolved essentially immediately because that sort of punitive "fail" rate has a way of making that happen. I'll take a "fail" that results in an annualized 365% return any time you'd like to "impose" it on me.

How about oil? As anyone who hasn't had their head firmly buried under a rock for the last month knows, oil has surged in price over $130/bbl and there are market calls for anywhere from $150-200 over the next months. There are many who claim this is all about speculation and more who claim it is about "peak oil."

Peak oil, by the way, doesn't mean we're running out.