Last week, Brett Arends at the Wall Street Journal made the argument that homes were now cheap.

It's important to note that real-estate prices in many areas are far from a historic bargain. And where there is a glut, prices -- obviously -- are likely to stay lower for longer. It is still a buyer's market. If you are buying, drive a hard bargain.

We here at Running of the Bulls believe that the odds of consumer price inflation in the future are elevated.  But is hyperinflation coming?  And I mean hyperinflation, as articulated by John Williams.

From The WSJ

[T]wo new studies ... suggest that when chief executive officers get paid more, shareholders end up earning less.

The first study, led by corporate-governance expert Lucian Bebchuk of Harvard Law School, looked at more than 2,000 companies to see what share of the total compensation earned by the top five executives went to the CEO. The researchers call this number—which averages about 35%—the "CEO pay slice."

From Tom Toles.

I would suggest you pop on over to Zero Hedge and read the article published a few days ago from SocGen on the coming crisis in China.

In an article on Monday, Bloomberg compared the returns on gold to CDs since gold hit its last peak.

Gold’s best year in three decades has yet to match the returns of an interest-bearing checking account for anyone who bought the most malleable of metals coveted for at least 5,000 years during the last peak in January 1980.

Gold was hammered on Friday as investors stampeded out of a crowded trade, me included.  The impetus for the sharp decline was the stronger than expected jobs report, and a fear that the Fed would start raising interest rates and withdrawing quantitative easing sooner than expected.

Making my broker happy, I blew out of my gold position Friday.  Had I not sold my position on Friday, November 27, I still would have sold it anyways. 

Gold was down 5.7% intra-day. One difference Friday compared to the Friday over Thanksgiving was that volume was huge. This is worrisome. Another big difference is that there was no intra-day reversal as there was over the Thanksgiving holiday.

The Cleveland Fed has written why it believes Canada's housing market did not collapse the way America's did.  They conclude that it was because lending standards were not as lax in Canada as they were in America, and financial "innovation" had not been adopted in Canada to the same extent as it had been south of the border, though that may have been because Canada tends to adopt innovation a few years after the States, and thus Canada may have been somewhat "lucky" in that the US mark