Top Stocks For 2011, Top Stocks To Buy, Best Stock Investments For 2011, Hot Stocks For 2011

"Silly Rabbit, Trix are for Kids!"

Remember those terrible 1980s cereal commercials? They were almost as bad as the cereal itself.

Trix, Captain Crunch, Cookie Crisp, Frankenberry... they might as well have called the stuff "chemical-coated sugar puffs." It makes you wonder whether General Mills had a secret deal with the American Dental Association to prop up the cavity-filling business.

Anyhow, those Saturday morning breakfast cereals remind your humble editor of government stimulus: Lots of sugar... lots of hype... 98% artificial coloring and flavoring... and pretty much zero nutritional value.

In keeping with the analogy, Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke is like the white rabbit from the Trix commercials. You know, the one who always got foiled with the tagline: "Silly Rabbit, Trix are for Kids!"

Except in Bernanke's case it would be: "Silly Chairman, Stimulus is for Gold Stocks!"

According to an article that appeared in The New York Times, written by Norihiro Kato, the Japanese have gotten good at sloughing off their worldly cares. Japan is no longer the world's number two economy; it was eclipsed this summer by China. But the Japanese are used to slippage. We all know the story of their 20-year economic decline; Japan's GDP actually peaked out about 15 years ago. It has been sliding ever since. That is only a part of the story. In terms of rice production, the Japanese have been downsizing for more than 40 years. Japan's population, too, grew by 1% per year from 1917 to 1977. It peaked out in 2005. There are fewer Japanese now than there were 5 years ago. If the trend continues, eventually there will be none.

Our back page dictum: people come to think what they must think when they must think it. What do people on the road to extinction think? Ask the Japanese. According to Kato, they become less competitive and more reflective, almost zen-like, turning an eye inward, away from striving, fighting, jostling and whacking...gracefully accepting whatever the economic gods send their way. In the meantime, they stay at home and save their money; like a lap dancer in retirement, they know it is all downhill from here.

You know they have to be thinking about it...

Well, if we could just shift to production... It's jolly well sealed at the top, after all.

Do the math and it's easy to see why.

Let's say BP could get 60,000 bpd from Macondo. That's $1.75 billion in annual revenue (assuming $80/barrel oil).

If the field lasts five years, that'd go a long way toward paying for BP's Macondo expenses — costs which are not anywhere near being totaled, by the way. These lawsuits and fines will drag out for years (though hopefully not a decade).

And that 60,000 bpd figure is conservative. The nearby Thunderhorse field peaked at around 250,000 bpd in 2009. Those production numbers are spread out among multiple rigs, of course.

If we estimate that Macondo prospect could produce 180k bpd, that's $5.25 billion in revenue per year. That's more than halfway to restoring BP's previous annual $10b/year dividend. And BP has already said it "may" drill into the reservoir again at some point in the future.

Gold stocks is known as perhaps the No. 1 "safe haven" in harsh economic times. Between mid-2007 and 2009, gold prices went from $940 an ounce to nearly $1,220 an ounce. That's more than a 33% gain at a time when equity prices, real estate prices and the value of the greenback were in a freefall.

That alone is reason enough to make investors want to add gold stocks to their portfolio... And they have.

In 2009, investors bought a total of 573 tonnes of gold through exchange-traded funds. That's 20.2 million ounces, and at the average price per ounce in 2009, that's an investment of $19.6 billion!

But with the strength of the dollar rising in the wake of the euro's near collapse, and the still-green shoots of recovery pushing up into the sun, individual investors might need more than one reason to keep or add gold stocks to their portfolios.

Indeed, here are five...

Nobody in the Pentagon will talk openly about it. Nobody in the White House knows what to do.

But make no mistake...

What I'm about to show you could be the deadliest surprise threat to your money and livelihood of the coming year.

I say "new" because as you'll see there's not much new about it at all — the pressure's been building behind this for the last 1,354 years!

Yet for the first time in history, that pressure has found its release. I’m imagining a volcano of blood.

When it blows, you could see your savings get SLAMMED... the dollar thrown into a TAILSPIN... and, here's what will stun the still-recovering world economy, gas and oil prices doubling or even tripling by sometime early in the coming year.

How on earth is that possible?