Came across this particularly nauseating chunk of propaganda. The media's negative slant on gold and gold investing has gone from covert to overt recently - another sign that we are closer to lift off.....

Money magazine - Author Kim Clark

"If, when you watch or read the financial news, you say to yourself, "This is crazy!" you'd often be right, says David Laibson, a Harvard economics professor.

Laibson's brain scans of people making difficult financial decisions, for example, have shown how hard-wired emotions can prevent investors from being the rational profit maximizers they need to be to invest wisely. One of the recent studies that Laibson was involved in used MRI brain images to prove that people are less emotional when it comes to making money-related decisions for others than when making moves that require their own immediate sacrifice.

Laibson says he sees evidence of some costly -- and common -- mental errors whenever he turns on the TV or attends a neighborhood party. But by realizing that you are prone to certain financial miscalculations, and that your financial wisdom has a life cycle of its own, you can take actions now to protect yourself in the future. Some of these moves may seem surprising. But put in the right context, they make perfect sense, he says.

What evidence of widespread financial miscues are you seeing now?

A terrific example: news reports and advertisements about gold. After a decade of spectacular returns, more and more people are piling in. This summer the gold ETF became the largest exchange-traded fund in the market, surpassing ones that track the Standard & Poor's 500!

What we have here is a classic example of people chasing the trend -- of mistakenly thinking that what has happened in the recent past will reproduce itself in the near future. I fear it is going to end badly.

How dangerous is it for investors to assume that recent patterns will repeat themselves?

The danger is very clear. A lot of people are mistakenly terrified of equities. They rightly recognize that equities are volatile. But they mistakenly conclude that because equities are volatile, they want no part of them. They end up overwhelmingly holding bonds in their 401(k) plans. I would urge them to rethink that for two reasons.

First, historically equities have offered a large premium over bonds. Now, this overperformance is not guaranteed, but it is our best guess of what is going to occur in the future......"