The Ruh Roh! Report for The Week of April 1, 2011

[Norman Bauer]

Happy April Fool's day all, unfortunatley the things we talk about here in the RR! are no joke. Let's get started!

THE LIST

1. First up is corn. The two things you have to watch to know how bad inflation is going to be is 1. oil and 2. corn. Both of them are used in just about everything we consume. Corn has been on the rise for the past year and this week it had a huge jump right along side of oil. As the Misses and I have been preaching, you need to buy on quantity now in order to better manage (if that is possible because of where I think food and energy are going) later. ZeroHedge had a wonderfully crass write-up about Walmart's CEO's warning this week that consumers should "Prepare for <em>serious inflation</em>". If there is one person in this world that you should take heed from when he speaks about inflation, this would be the man. FYI - Walmart is the #3 trade partner with China, that's just behind the US and the UK.

2. Someone had posted this great visual - A FRIGHTNING SATELITE TOUR OF AMERICA'S FORECLOSURE WASTELANDS !

3. Another crack-down by the government. This time it is those evil Dairy Farmers whom the FDA has in it's cross hairs.

4. In case you missed it, yours truly wrote up a piece on Iran's new blockbuster video. It is my public admission that I was wrong. The video is not for the faint of heart.

5. From Bloomberg comes this article confirming "Municide". The next big underreported story is the Commercial Real Estate bubble, but I suppose we will be hearing more on that in the weeks and months ahead.

6. Gary North posed a great question in this weeks commentary The Most World's Important Unanswered Historical Question: "What Changed in 1800?" - he does not answer the question because he says he has no empirical proof. I'll speculate that the answer lies in the Louisianan Purchase, which opened the gate for average people to obtain <em>real wealth</em> for the first time in human history.

7. Finally I'll close with this great article on why you should garden as if your life depends on it...because it does.

Thanks all and have a great week!

Norm

PS: sorry for the delay it was another busy week.

--
The website of some guy - http://normanbauer.info
Sign up for his weekly email newsletter "The Ruh Roh! Report" too by going visiting http://groups.google.com/group/the-ruh-roh-report