I have been very wrong about gold over the past six months ... something Jim Wiandt, Steven Schoenfeld and many others point out to me on a daily basis.

So it's with great trepidation that I even mention the barbaric metal. But maybe one of you gold bulls can explain what happened yesterday to me. Benazir Bhutto is assassinated, throwing a nuclear power that borders Afghanistan into chaos, and gold ... trades down? Isn't it supposed to be the safe haven asset?

In contrast, I happened to notice that oil prices rose $1/barrel to $97/barrel. Is "black gold" the new gold? Hoarding oil would make a lot more sense to me than hoarding the gold.

Breaking The Buck

On a completely different note, I found this story on money market funds to be very interesting ... and a bit frightening. Ten North American fund companies, including Janus, have been injecting money into their money market funds to prevent them from breaking the buck. Janus had to pony up over $100 million to keep its fund on par. The reason? Asset-backed paper has become illiquid and less valuable thanks to the credit crisis.

Blackrock has actually suspended redemptions on one of its institutional money market funds, if you can believe it.

The reason I mention this is that we will be posting a great article later today by John Serrapere, which provides some deep analysis on the state of the credit markets. To say that Serraperre is bearish right now is an understatement. When you combine his insights with the money market news, it suggests to me that the current credit crisis is still in the early innings.

Real Estate

To round out this random (and rather gloomy) blog, I wanted to call attention to the discussion at the end of our real estate article. Nothing provokes more discussion at IndexUniverse headquarters than real estate. Don and Jim think everything's ducky, while I'm the only one willing to take a cold, hard, sober look at the facts.

I'll only say this: Last year, Jim was clinging to the old canard that home prices never go down nationwide, and that they'll only drop in a few overheated local markets. Now, they're down almost 7% on a year-over-year basis across the country.

Today, Jim still thinks that my call for a 25-30% drop in national home prices is beyond consideration. I guess we'll see...