Below are three headlines from mainstream media publications. Next are three dates. As a mental exercise, try to guess which date goes with which magazine story.

A) The Coming Gold Bust

B) Big Boom in Barbarous Relic

C) Gold Fever: Doomsday Investing Slows as Economy Recovers -- All that glitters may not make your fortune.

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1) March 19, 2010

2) December 3, 2009

3) February 26, 1979

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If the gold market is a bubble, and the bull market is about to end , one would expect to see euphoric headlines, something along the lines of: "Investors Going Gaga for Gold!" with subtitles: "HOT!!! Our Top 25 junior gold miners RIGHT NOW!"

Which headlines are we actually seeing now?

Answers:

A - 2

http://money.cnn.com/2010/05/19/news/economy/gold.price.collapse.fortune/

B - 3

http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,920179-1,00.html

C - 1

http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1987605,00.html?xid=aol-direct

The entire 1979 is worth reading because it is so eerily similar to the problems we are facing today, but these are my favorite snips:

Gold fever in the U.S. is so widespread that it is no longer accurate to speak of its victims as if they were right-wing zealots haunted by nightmares of starving marauders. A more typical buyer is New York Suburbanite Phillip Knapp, who is vice president of a paper firm. With a wife, three children and a six-figure income, Knapp seems every bit the successful American who ought to have confidence that the future will be as good to him as the past has been. But says he: "In 1975 I started to worry about where I could put my money. I say one thing to myself: it's not the franc or gold or silver that is going up, it's the dollar that is going down, and that's what worries me. Soon we will all be making $100,000 a year, and instead of increases in buying power we'll have $1 candy bars."

At Deak-Perera, the nation's largest retailer of gold coins, Chairman Nicholas Deak reports that some of his recent customers have been high school kids. Says he: "It's a little scary. They just walk in and say they have a little money and they want to buy a Krugerrand."

In the words of James Sinclair, a leading New York gold broker, the price of the metal "has become a kind of Dow Jones index of investor anxieties." A worldwide subculture of goldbugs is thriving on the doubts. Gold has its bankers and boosters, its brokers and dealers, its lecturers and analysts. Each of them can quote Robert Browning: "Leave the fire ashes, what survives is gold."

Hysteria