1. Is it still a good time to invest in gold? The price of gold is touching record highs every day.

Gold's 34 percent rally this year has been due to investor worries over the US and Euro zone debt burdens, and their impact on currency markets. The rise in the price of gold reflects the lack of trust and faith investors have in governments and their central banks. As governments continue to print money, investors are forced to flee to hard currencies like gold. Gold prices will rally in the short term again if the US Fed goes for another round of quantitative easing (QE3). Investors are increasingly unconvinced of European leaders' abilities to tackle the regional debt crises as well as the US government's ability to push its economy, and are expecting one more round of quantitative easing. Signs of a slowing global growth rate may force central banks to step up stimulus measures. QE3 may become necessary because the stoppage of money supply can cause interest rates to go up and rising interest rates will choke whatever nascent recovery the US economy has had so far. Safe haven : Gold's 'safe haven' status received another boost when Switzerland's central bank set a limit on how much the Swiss Franc can gain. Investors have poured money into the Swiss Franc, which they see as one of the few safe places for assets amid global financial turmoil. Investors saw it as another safe haven along with gold. The Swiss Franc strengthened, causing worries that its export-driven economy will be damaged by the currency's strength. Short-term outlook : The US Fed's Chairman, Ben Bernanke, finds the rise in the price of gold illogical. Bernanke said the rise was mainly due to 'tradition' and not because of anything intrinsic. The well-known economist Paul Krugman said gold prices will go up swiftly in the short run but will taper off as people are buying gold not as a protection against inflation but because other types of investments are not yielding any returns.

2. Risk of a global recession is up 50% The risk of another global recession has increased to one-in-two. There is a pretty good chance of an actual stall which would lead the global economy to slide backward, the risk of a recession as "quite high, maybe 50%. The need is for advanced economies to reverse fiscal belt-tightening and central banks to adopt a more expansionary monetary policy. Three years after the collapse of Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc., the global recovery is faltering and the euro-region debt crisis is roiling markets and clouding growth prospects across the 17-nation euro region. These countries need to realize that for those countries which are not having financing problems -- at least five of the G-7 are able to borrow quite freely -- that they need to postpone austerity measures on the fiscal side and that the central banks need to be expanding, not tightening, referring to the Group of Seven major industrialized nations. Krugman, a columnist for the New York Times who was invited to give a speech at Russian President Dmitry Medvedev's global policy forum in Yaroslav, said China's fastgrowing economy isn't large enough to help reverse the slump. China, the world's second-largest economy, on September 7 raised its growth estimate for 2010 to 10.4%. Krugman also said President Barack Obama has "close to zero chance" of getting his $447 billion jobs plan passed by the Republican-held Congress, which means unemployment will stay persistently high. "Realistically, the chance of getting any of it is very close to zero," Krugman said before Obama unveiled his plan. "That's a bad thing. We're going to be seeing unemployment at something like its current levels, perhaps even higher, right through next year and beyond." Job growth in the US stalled last month and the unemployment rate has hovered at or above 9% for more than two years. Obama, who faces re-election next year, has job- approval ratings at new lows as public

doubts about his stewardship of the economy rise. Public opinion of Congress has dropped even lower. US gross domestic product climbed at a 1% annual rate from April through June, down from a 1.3% prior estimate, figures released by the Commerce Department on Aug. 26 showed. Combined with the 0.4 per cent annual rate of growth in the first three months of the year, the past two quarters were the weakest of the recovery that began in mid-2009.