Dion,

When I was at Tulane Medical I learned a very important lesson about statistics and outcomes of scientific experiments. True scientific method dictates that a scientist does an experiment and then records, unbiasedly the results.

However, if one already has the results that one wants, everything changes. By this I mean, one can design an experiment and tweak it in any number of a million ways to get the result he or she wants. I saw this done over and over again by "scientists" doing research for pharmaceutical companies at Tulane. "Oops that didn't work, let's try it this way."

Eventually if you flip a coin enough times you can get it to land on heads 9 out of 10 times. Then you immediately publish those results, "Coins land on heads 9 out of 10 times!"

Eventually it all comes down to common sense. I can look at a coin and say, "That's not a logical assumption." And reject the data. In some "scientific" circles I might be ostracized for such thinking, but so it goes.

So we have to all be careful when examining these statistics. I can't say I really trust any set of numbers as much as my eyes. I don't care what the government puts out about inflation. I went to Fed Ex a letter yesterday and it was $44. I think when I was applying to medical school, it was $12.95 for an overnight letter. Food, stamps, cell phone bills, baseball equipment... everything is going up. I know that. You know that, but the numbers say it just isn't happening. That doesn't make me happy, but believe it or not. It makes many people happy to a point. That point is getting close to being reached.

I agree, if 600 banks go under, we will eventually have deflation, but I agree with Jim Puplava, we will have massive inflation before deflation. Every inflation , according to Dines, ends in a deflation. Historically, this appears to be correct. The FED will try to inflate us out of this, and they will fail, and we just might sink into a massive depression.

Fortunately, gold or real money, should do well in either scenario. That's why I'm out of everything except precious metals right now.

I spoke with an old farmer in the E.R. the other day about growing up in Missouri during the Great Depression. I asked him very simply what the times were like. He said, "There was no money." This was very profound.

As I talked to him I realized he didn't mean that his family had no money. He meant that nobody had any money. There just wasn't any money out there. When something like this happens again it will be good to have money, and money that won't go out of style. Gold and Silver. Bull