Jon Stewart on gold

When gold prices plummet and folks like G. Gordon Liddy and Glenn Beck start advising investors to hoard like Yosemite Sam, there's a voice that cuts through the commodity fever to the heart of the matter: Jon Stewart's.

Back on April 15, gold prices dropped to $1,321 per ounce and hit their lowest point since cresting $1,920 per ounce in September 2011.

As convicted Watergate conspirator Liddy shilled for gold in commercial breaks and Beck blamed the slide on a shadowy cabal of government, media and otherworldly forces bent on stripping Americans of their precious gold and damning them to a life of slavery, Stewart used the pulpit on Viacom (VIA -0.74%)-owned Comedy Central's "The Daily Show" earlier this week to suggest it might just be a market correction.

The market wasted little time proving him right, as prices climbed roughly 7% by Wednesday to $1,453.10 per ounce. Still, that didn't prevent Stewart from flogging Beck for his assertion that investors should listen to God by quoting decidedly anti-gold passages from the Bible's books of Exodus and Job.

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[forwarded from Buddy]

The crash of the price of paper gold on Monday has unleashed an unprecedented global frenzy to buy physical gold and silver.  All over the planet, people are recognizing that this is a unique opportunity to be able to acquire large amounts of gold and silver at a bargain price.  So precious metals dealers now find themselves being overwhelmed with orders in the United States, in Canada, in Europe and over in Asia.

Will this massive run on physical gold and silver soon lead to widespread shortages of those metals?  Instead of frightening people away from gold and silver,the takedown of paper gold seems to have had just the opposite effect.  People just can’t seem to get enough physical gold and silver right now.  Those that wish that they had gotten into gold when it was less than $1400 an ounce are able to do so now, and it is absolutely insane that silver is sitting at about $23 an ounce.

If the big banks continue to play games with the price of gold, we are going to see existing supplies of physical gold and silver dry up very quickly.  And once reports of physical shortages of gold and silver become widespread, it is going to absolutely rock the financial world.  But this is what happens when you manipulate free markets – it often has unintended consequences far beyond anything that you ever imagined.

[so doesn't this mean that that gold has bottomed?]