Especially when the commodity in question is garlic.

According to reports in China Business News, prices in Jinxiang, China’s garlic-growing capital, have seen a fortyfold increase since March.

More on the Chinese garlic bubble (via The Economist).

Hide the Decline (sung to Tommy James’ Draggin’ the Line)

Subtitled Hitler rant video (these are always worth a look)

Click HERE to register

Use the Promotion Code “Letourneau” to save the $20 admission charge.

Montreal is a great city and Quebec has a great mining heritage.

The world is making policy decisions based on climate model predictions that aren’t coming true. Thankfully, the BBC is irritating the global warming tribe by pointing out that it isn’t getting warmer.

What happened to global warming?
This headline may come as a bit of a surprise, so too might that fact that the warmest year recorded globally was not in 2008 or 2007, but in 1998.
More from BBC News

In fact, it is pretty chilly in North America and Europe.

Data doesn’t seem to matter anymore. An Inconvenient Truth was “a long time ago” but we don’t see the Rolling Stones forgetting the lyrics to Satisfaction (at least not yet). Watch Al Gore dismiss a challenge from Phelim McAleer by glibly mentioning polar bears and saying “you don’t think they’re endangered do you?”

Note to Al Gore – the best estimates of the global polar bear population is 20-25 thousand.

Worst. Climate. Campaign. Ever. according to Nature

The proposed settlement terms include:

Yahoo! agreed to make changes in its search advertising and disclosures. I put some of the juicy bits in italics.

Yahoo! will pay a $20 refund (”Refund”) to eligible Class members who are out of business.

How will they track down businesses that are no longer in existence?

XI. How Will The Lawyers Be Paid? Will The Class Representatives Receive Service Awards?

Class Counsel will apply for attorneys’ fees of $4,170,000, plus reimbursement of expenses of approximately $100,000, and for service awards to the three Class Representatives of $10,000 each. Yahoo! has agreed to pay those fees, expenses and service awards, in the total amount of $4.3 million, in addition to providing the other settlement benefits described above in Section VI. Attorneys’ fees, reimbursement of costs, and service awards to Class Representatives must be approved by the Court.

I hope everyone is happy with the settlement. Holding Yahoo!’s feet to the fire on pay-per-click quality issues is good for advertising consumers but I wonder if marketplace competition might have led to the same outcome at less cost.

You can find out more about the lawsuit here.

We have no tsunami risk.

The FBI captured some tsunami footage from an American Samoa parking lot. It doesn’t look like anyone was expecting it.

NOTE – Skip ahead to the 1:40 minute mark if you can’t stand the suspense…

Vinyl siding and hail don’t mix.

My Canadian online broker treated me to this sunny message today…

Increased Margin Buying Power Now Available!

At first I thought it was some kind of cruel trick but the font was green and large, punctuated by an explanation mark to drive home the excitement of this new development. Wasn’t margin a way to gain leverage on investments? Leverage is a dirty word in the investment community. Leverage is what created the biggest financial catastrophe known to mankind. Why would the margin “buying power” be increased for over 1,000 securities?

My broker says leverage can:

1. Increase returns
2. Provide tax benefits
3. Allow for greater flexibility and diversification

There were some links below these points that I didn’t click until after I started writing this. They mentioned things like risk. Clicking through to a third page led to a download of a 57 page PDF file of service agreements and disclosure. Who has time for legal mumbo jumbo when the market is moving?

And yet… I can still remember speaking at the San Francisco Hard Assets Conference last November where one of the few investable themes was a list of companies that were trading at or below their cash values. Exeter Resources (XRA) was being admonished by analysts for insisting on drilling up their Caspiche property with a 9300 m (30,500 ft) drilling program. Spending C$8 million on drilling with a treasury of “only” C$23 million was viewed as reckless. What would they do in 3 years when all the cash was gone?

Exeter president, Yale Simpson, stood up at a dinner in the Machiavelli Room that evening (which was in the basement Kuletos which seemed like a straight up kinda place) and rebutted his critics by pointing out that the money Exeter was spending would create value for shareholders by proving up resources in a higher grade portion of their deposit. Bigger companies were willing to pay for proved resources and he would be doing shareholders a major disservice by not proving the value of Exeter’s assets. Back then their share price was ~US$1.50, yesterday it closed at US$5.55 (and they had C$34.4 million in the till as of June 30th).

Turns out the market has a thing for companies with real assets after all. The romance is turning torrid.

Can I buy Exeter on margin?

As one colleague recently said when I first passed on an IPO, “Oh Jim, Don’t think too hard on this one…”

I’m trying not to think too much.

Lord, lord, lord.  Protect me from the consequences of the above prayer. ~Douglas Adams, Mostly Harmless

Reprinted by Permission C 2009 Minyanville Media, Inc.

This brings up some thorny questions. What do contrarians do when they’re right? How should contrarian investors position themselves in this rising market?