You've lived with your fear for somtime now Baba, like many others, but in your case your still in the game, just don't get thrown off the saddle. It will be volatile with many counter arguments but now is the time to stay focussed to make all the recent pain worthwhile. The next few years will be very large profit opportunities in my view whether Obama does anything right or everything wrong, the die is cast and it took 15-20 years of poor leadership to get to this point. The likely case scenario for the US following this recession is stagflation, low growth for many years with above average inflation and it just so happens this is also the best case for gold/silver stocks but they also do well in hyper-inflation and deflation. Only thing bad for gold is good solid growth with low inflation and stable paper money, what we used to think of as normal times, but it's doubtful we will see this for many years.