us employment stats, page-22

It doesn't take much to bring out the America haters on this forum. The old Australian culture cringe is truly alive and flourishing on the Gold forum. No amount of good news will ever help here. I envision a lot of posters here praying to a golden idol fervently beseeching their god to smite America down. The Pom with plums in his writing hand is probably turning over in his customary seat, 1A. His visceral hatred of America is probably turning his Chablis sour.

Skol has his anecdotal markers, increase In Airline flights etc to predict that things will be improving. In October I had found one that started me reducing cash reserves and putting into equities. My wife and I spent a little over a month in France, Italy, Switzerland and Holland. What I saw were tons of American tourists everywhere. By my reasoning, these people would not be spending a lot of money on holidays unless they had money and were confident of more coming in. So the signals told me to go almost all in equity wise. Certainly has paid off. And April sees a pretty large inflow of fully franked dividends. Since we're both 62 now and in "pension mode" in the superfund, we also get a full refund of franking credits instead of a tax credit. Much better than my return on gold would, or will be.

Meanwhile, on Monday we leave for America for over four months. We go almost every year and my wife has always wanted to actually live there and see what it's like in daily life, going to grocery store, gym etc. So we are doing HomeExchange.com to swap our Bali Villa for two months with a couple in Santa Barbara, another swap in Florida, and then one in North Carolina. And finally two weeks mid town Manhatten. All for free! Gotta love home exchange. Anyway, that much time and the geographic diversity should give a pretty fair idea of how things are actually going. I seriously doubt 90 percent of the posters here have ever been to America, much less out of Australia. Unless you count Kuta.

Keep them on their toes Skol. I'll keep sending you thumbs up!