Gold Hits New High as Bernanke Talks, Mish and Jim Rodgers on Silver, and Japan Outlook to Negative

As Bernanke spoke today (nothing big...just saying he will continue QE2 to the end and inflation is temporary) gold hits a new high:

Why not address this Big Ben?  And yet he still believes that when QE2 ends, we won't see a downturn or large correction.  We will see come July.

Mish had a post today letting everyone know that he sold all his silver (which went up to $48 today during Bernanke's shindig) and bought gold with the profits.  Not a bad idea to trade one precious metal for another in my opinion.  Meanwhile, Jim Rodgers is predicting that the U.S. will lose its AAA credit rating soon.  From Lewrockwell.com: 

Speaking to Investment Week, Rogers said: “Eventually it will happen. Not this month, or this quarter, but it is certainly going to happen”.

“The US is the largest indebted nation in the history of the world and the debt is going higher and higher," Rogers added.
A new report from Deutsche Bank ranks the US government as the world's fourth riskiest sovereign borrower, behind Greece, Ireland and Portugal, and just ahead of Italy.

"I prefer to look at the things that are still depressed. Natural gas is depressed compared to oil, silver is depressed compared to gold. I would rather look at the things within those sectors to see what are the things that are still depressed and see if maybe that is where we should be putting money".
Clarifying his stance on silver and crude oil, he said:  "Silver has certainly gone up a lot in the last 9-10 months. There is no question about that, but remember, silver is still 10% below where it was 31 years ago. I bet you do not know many things that are 10% below where they were 31 years ago".
"Silver has been going up but on a historic basis, it is still very depressed.

Silver may be depressed but some have been weary of its recent and rapid clime.

Speaking of rapid clime, check out this report on Silicon Valley's boom.  Maybe Bernanke's money printing is working out better than he thinks.  If you want to see Ron Paul's response to Bernanke, check it out here.  He obviously wasn't impressed.  For more evidence, Starbucks is recording big profits as commodity prices go up.

S&P's recent trend of being late on their ratings continues today as they have announced their downgrade of Japan.  From Bloomberg:

Japan’s sovereign-rating outlook was cut to “negative” by Standard & Poor’s as the nation’s reconstruction needs following last month’s earthquake will likely add to what’s already the world’s biggest debt load.

Why was this not done a month ago?  Did the idea that Japan would rack up more debt trying to fix things just come up?

I will end with this surprising news (no, not the irrelevant fact that Obama finally released his birth certificate) that U.K. has the third biggest budget deficit in Europe:

Britain’s shortfall in its finances amounted to 10.4pc of gross domestic product (GDP) in 2010, according to data for each of the EU’s 27 member states from the statistics agency Eurostat.

That meant the UK had a bigger deficit, or annual shortfall, than the recently bailed-out Portugal and also Spain, which is viewed as the next euro-using nation to potentially need international aid.