RYING TO KEEP tabs on what the largest, best funded and presumably the best informed industry-side “commercial” futures traders are doing in gold and silver opens a window into their expectations for the metals, writes Gene Arensberg in his GotGoldReport.

Or so we think. But what happens when these long-time veteran traders do the unexpected?

In most of our time following the weekly Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) commitments of traders (COT) reports, we saw increases in the price of silver metal reflected in the

year 2011 is the year when inflation will play the role of wrecking ball. It seems to threaten everything from emerging markets to the pretty earnings narrative of the market as a whole.

I use the term “inflation” here as the man on the street does. It is when prices for most everything go up. It is not the best definition, because it obscures the reason why prices for most everything go up in the first place. The reason is that governments everywhere can’t help but print lots of money. But let us not wander off course. It is what it is.

Read more: Inflation’s First Phase http://dailyreckoning.com/inflations-first-phase/#ixzz1DEH83UfW

here are lots of ways to describe money: moolah, lean green, dinero … I memorized one definition of “money” from an economic textbook way back in 1966: “A medium of exchange and a store of value,” it said. Well, yes, I suppose, although it failed miserably in the latter capacity in subsequent years. My primer also neglected to mention the increasingly dominant function that money was to assume in a finance-oriented, capitalistic system: Money can be used to make money. Not that interest rates and biblical usury aren’t millenniums old. I remember a story from Sidney Homer’s history of finance that described how a BC-era borrower would be forced to turn over his wife as collateral upon default – wondering at the time whether that might be an incentive for a future Mesopotamian debt bubble! Still, my textbook was nowhere near contemplating the half century of financial “innovation” that was ahead and how money and its levering was to be the foundation for much of America’s prosperity.

Money would also become the economic and political we

I will be doing two stock trading workshops in Vancouver at the Convention Center on Tuesday February 15th. Disnat is the sponsor so they are free to attend but we ask that you register so we can have enough space. I will teach techniques for analyzing stocks and demonstrate some of the tools that I use to find opportunities. To register for the 2:00 presentation, click here. For the 7:00 pm presentation, click here. I look forward to seeing those who can make it!