This current crisis felt like we came to the brink of hyperinflation, but managed to scramble through it without quite tipping the balance. Nothing is fundamen

This current crisis felt like we came to the brink of hyperinflation, but managed to scramble through it without quite tipping the balance. Nothing is fundamentally fixed, though, so I expect the next big crisis 5 or 10 years down the road to end with the revaluation of the dollar, Zimbabwe style. Gold is overhyped right now -- anyone buying gold at the moment is a fool -- and, as a rule of thumb, any commodity that people watch like a hawk (gold, silver, oil) is going to have second-order effects that aren't necessarily correlated with supply/demand and isn't a very safe bet. That said, a lot of other less-watched commodities will be the first in line as newly-printed money trickles out into the economy and fuels an artificial manufacturing boom: copper, zinc, maybe some of the catalyst metals like palladium (too volatile for me), iron/steel to a far lesser extent (again, too volatile for me). If I'd had the money at the time to follow my gut in 2008, I would've made a killing on copper alone -- and if I'd put some into platinum, one year ago, pre-auto-bailout, I'd have made a very comfortable one-year return (on the order of 250%).