I don't buy the usual goldbug arguments.

But at the same time, maybe it's true that the reason gold's at $1200 is that we've had a giant multi-year credit bubble that's caused the US real estate crash, now the Euro sovereign debt crisis, soon a Chinese real estate crisis, and then a US sovereign debt crisis? I personally feel the problem's not so much "fiat currency" as it is "fiat credit": we've had an explosion of credit creation thru leveraging, and that's what's distorted the markets so much over the past few years. Governments don't have a monopoly on printing dollars y'know!

Someone smarter than all of us (Buffett?) said that gold will be the ultimate asset bubble - meaning, it'll be the final bubble before we crash into the new post-apocalyptic Mad Max/Tales from the Afternow dark age.

Meanwhile, I bet the 3 billion people in India, China, the Islamic bloc, Indonesia and Latin America who are busy joining the middle class will want to start buying a bit of gold for their girlfriends. Retail demand might be a bigger driver in future than it is now.

And wasn't there something about a coming Peak Gold situation?

Anyway, more importantly, IS CENTURY TRADING YET?