The scam enabled by today’s financial ““markets”” coupled with lots of easy cheap credit flowing to big monied interests is every bit as egregious as the company store of old; only today’s victims are mostly blind to the way that the system is rigged against them.

Run this scam long enough and one day we’ll discover that the banks and their proxy agents — private equity funds, hedge funds, endowments, and family offices, etc — own all of the productive farmland, all of the mines, all of the oil wells, all of the timberland, and every other means of primary wealth production.

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Believe it or not, the rock band Van Halen found a brilliant way to teach how having good indicators is key to achieving success.

This is extremely true for the world of investing, where you're deploying capital based upon an expected future return. How do you determine when it's a good time to enter into an investment? Once in it, how do monitor the conditions supporting your rationale for holding it — are those changing? And if so, are they getting better or worse? When should you exit the position?

For all of these questions, the better the indicators you use, the more accurate and informed your decision-making will be. And the better your returns as an investor will be.

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One of the most perplexing mysteries to us is that right as the Federal Reserve embarked on QE3 — which was a huge, enormous, $85 billion a month experiment — commodities began a multiyear decline within two weeks of that announcement. Concurrently, the world’s central banks plunged the world into steeply negative real interest rates, a condition that has almost always resulted in booming commodity prices — but not this time. Today, the ratio between commodity prices and equities is at one of, if not the most, extreme points in history.

To explain that gap, we talk this week with Brien Lundin, publisher of Gold Newsletter and producer of the New Orleans Investment Conference (where Chris and Adam are speaking on Oct 25-28):

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Given the brutal start to the markets in the first three weeks of 2016, we thought it a good time to check in with the team at New Harbor Financial. We have had them on our podcast periodically over the past years as the market churned to ever new highs, and have always appreciated their skepticism of these liquidity-driven ""markets"" as well as their unwavering commitment to risk management should the party in stocks end suddenly.

So, how is their risk-managed approach faring now that the S&P 500 has suddenly dropped 8% since Christmas? Quite well. Their general portfolio is flat for the year so far — evidence that caution, prudence and hedging can indeed preserve capital during market downdrafts.

We've invited the New Harbor team back on this week to hear their latest assessment on the markets, as well as how they're approaching their portfolio positioning moving forward.

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Two years since his last interview with us, investor Jim Rogers returns and notes that the risks he warned of last time have only gotten worse. In this week's podcast, Jim shares his rational for predicting:

• increased wealth confiscation by the central planners
• a pending major financial market collapse
• gold's return as the preferred safe haven investment
• more oil price weakness, followed by a trend reversal
• Russia's rebound
• a China bubble reckoning
• agriculture's long-term value

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In theory, regulation is supposed to set and enforce the rules of the game that market participants play by, in order to ensure that price discovery remains efficient, effective — and most important — fair.

In practice, there's plenty of debate to be had on how successful our regulators are in effecting their mission. And one investment class in particular, commodities, frequently comes under criticism for questionable price action.

So, this week we talk with Bart Chilton, former Commissioner of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC), about price discovery within the commodity markets, and whether investors can have confidence in the "fairness" of the current system.

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Few people understand the global economy and its (mis)management better than David Stockman — former director of the OMB under President Reagan, former US Representative, best-selling author of The Great Deformation, and veteran financier.

David is now loudly warning that events have entered the crack-up phase, which he predicts will be defined by the following 4 developments:

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