links for 2011-09-12

it recently occurred to me that virtually no one who recognized the tech-stock and/or real-estate bubble now says that gold is a bubble. In fact, almost all of us who identified those bubbles long before they burst actually own gold, and have for quite a while. It is really only the people who missed the previous two who now think gold is a bubble. They were painfully wrong in the past, so now they are determined to spot the "next" one.

The aim of the contingency plan is to shield German banks from losses from a possible Greek default, which has a more-than 90 percent chance of happening within five years, prices for insurance against default show.