Last Call to board Gold Train !

JPMorgan Chase & Co will begin trading physical oil by year-end, increasing its exposure in a market that could rise to $200 a barrel, the bank’s global head of commodities said on Wednesday.

Hedging allows producers to lock in prices for future output, but it can backfire if metals prices rise above the hedged price. High gold prices have prompted producers to lower their hedging positions.

New York’s main oil futures contract, light sweet crude for June delivery, beat the previous peak of 126.98 that was set on Tuesday owing to worries about tight supplies despite a downgrade to global oil demand growth for 2008.

The world economy is “teetering on the brink” of a severe downturn

Mineral-laden Venezuela on Thursday shut the door to new gold projects and threatened other mining and logging concessions in a step by leftist President Hugo Chavez to tighten control of natural resources.

A group of Democratic senators wants to make a massive arms sale to Saudi Arabia contingent on getting cheaper oil, reports AFP. “We are saying to the Saudis that, if you don’t help us, why should we be helping you?”

A similar system was approved and built in the 1990s, then abandoned after critics labeled it a “toilet-to-tap” scheme.

Federal Funds provided through the so-called discount window for banks rose by $2.8 billion to a daily average of $14.4 billion in the week to May 14, the central bank said today in Washington.

This article contains several forecasts, including the possible start of a major war with unforeseeable consequences, if the U.S. should happen to attack Iran . Of course it is in the nature of forecasts to be speculative. There are also forecasts that are intended to serve as warnings and thereby contribute to preventing the events under analysis from ever taking place.

Poison from the top down, Fed is wrong to signal end of crisis, more negative surprises in the markets to come, Mortgage market upside down, major conflicts always a threat, It could be major conflicts are going to break out almost simultaneously to cover up the economic and financial collapse in the US, which will spread worldwide.

By a margin of more than six-to-one (61% to 9%), the U.S. public now says free trade agreements result in job losses rather than in new jobs; a solid majority (56%) also says that free trade makes wages lower in the United States, and half (50%) say it slows the economy.

Evidently “promoting market stability” means that whistle-blowers and the SEC must be silenced so that a grossly illegal situation can continue, since the crime is so pervasive that to expose it and prosecute the criminals would unravel the whole financial system.

The entire housing bubble was essentially a debt bubble, driven by lending standards which sank to near-zero (anyone with a pulse willing to lie was suddenly qualified to borrow hundreds of thousands of dollars),

California’s foreclosure crisis passed another ominous milestone in April, when more than 1,000 foreclosed homes were auctioned off every weekday at courthouses across the state