My apologies for the extreme quiet here -- I feel like I've been moonlighting over the last two months, since I've been spending all my spare hours reading up on finance, economics, investing, asset protection, and other pressing topics. The short version: I don't think that the world economy is about to break into happy days again anytime soon, in fact I think that the recent stock market rally is a sucker punch, that the worst is yet to come, and that we won't experience a V-shaped recovery or even a W-shaped recovery but more of an L-shaped recovery, wherein we'll be bumping along the bottom for quite some time while we slowly work through the massive excesses of the last 25 years. I freely admit that I might be wrong, but at least I'm attempting to educate myself about likely scenarios and taking practical steps to protect my assets (and perhaps even profit along the way!)...