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Last week’s G-20 summit was a bigger success than anyone imagined. Among other items, the group agreed to increase the loans available to struggling countries to $1.1 trillion. That boost in funding is a prime example of why I think investors should be looking toward gold--and gold miners, in particular. We’re seeing unprecedented global spending, and I think a wave of inflation may be just off the horizon. Central banks around the world have been stirring together all the right ingredients for a big batch of inflation--and last week’s G-20 summit was just icing on the cake.

Last Thursday, in a financial story that you may have missed, Nasdaq OMX Group announced that it had created a new index. It’s called the Nasdaq OMX Government Relief Index and it is now trading under the symbol QGRI. The components of the index will be the companies that receive $1 billion or more under the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) or any other government handout program. Creating and updating indexes like The Bailout Index (my term) is one way financial services companies make a living. But I think I’ll give The Bailout Index a pass

So with the Detroit auto show starting this week and running through January 25, I’ve been paying attention to what might be coming down the line. No surprise, there are lots of electric and hybrid concept cars on display, including the Chevy Volt. And yes, the Volt is still scheduled to go into production--at the end of 2010, about 23 months from now. That’s a long ways off, especially when you realize that a full two years have passed already since the car was first announced.

Shifting into academic/environment/energy mode, I recently read an article in The New York Times that claimed we’d save more fuel as a country if we stopped measuring miles-per-gallon and began measuring gallons per 10,000 miles. On the surface, it doesn’t seem to make sense, and I assume that’s because we’ve been brainwashed (conditioned) into thinking m.p.g. is the gold standard. So I opened up a spreadsheet and tried some scenarios, and here’s what I found. It’s absolutely true.

As my two daughters reconnected with old friends, it slowly became clear to me that many of these young people, mainly college-educated, are unemployed, and about this I have a few thoughts. One, times are tough. Two, many of these young adults have skills that are rather loosely defined. When the economy was booming, their liberal arts degrees might have been the ticket to many types of employment, but now their prospects are bleak. Three, people will now keep their jobs longer. In the recent boom years, job-hopping became fashionable. Now, just as the trading-up of houses is history, so is job-hopping. Four, vocational training is on the upswing, as people young and old looking to improve their employment prospects take classes to learn marketable skills.

Plummeting prices last year brought many stocks down 50% or more, so that their yields now look extraordinarily high. My database now shows 63 stocks with annual yields of 20% or more. But there’s something wrong with these stocks--business at every one of these high-yielding firms is faltering. The stocks’ plunges tell us that. And while the yields may look high today, they’re based on the past 12 months. If business shrinks, the dividend will shrink more. And if the business shrinks, the stock price may fall further, too. All in all, chasing these super-high yields is a dangerous game, suited only for professionals who can determine when the selling has been overdone and when the dividend is secure.

Last year, I wrote about my former life as a newspaper employee and what I think about the hurting business. A lot has changed since then, with several newspapers shutting down operations (or threatening to), including the Rocky Mountain News and the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, and others laying off even more employees as revenues continue to plummet. But the question remains: Can newspapers be saved?

As someone with more than a decade’s worth of experience writing about individual investing for Forbes and now for the Cabot Green Investor--and investing for myself for longer--I’m excited by the profit potential not only from the companies capitalizing on the current regulations, but also the ones that stand to benefit from the $115.9 billion of U.S. economic stimulus money I calculate is going toward Green projects, from electric vehicle conversion funding to watershed protection projects to modernizing the electrical grid.

Note from Cabot Wealth Advisory Editor Elyse Andrews: Are you looking for a way to really grow your money? How about the opportunity to turn $25,000 into $88,994? This knockout return is available from a rare security that combines stocks and bonds. Only eight of them exist. In today’s issue, Carla Pasternak, editor of StreetAuthority’s High-Yield Investing, explains what these securities are and how they work. The only question remaining is this: Why aren’t they juicing the returns in your portfolio?

Every so often, I compile the responses to the survey at the bottom of each issue of Cabot Wealth Advisory and from our welcome survey, which is sent to new subscribers. This week, it was time to read the results and there were some very interesting responses. Most responses were complimentary and some contained specific questions or requests for information, which is what I’m going to address today.

Has every ship run aground? Have all the oceans frozen over? You might think so if you’ve followed the dramatic tumble of the Baltic Dry Index. The index tracks the price to ship dry goods--everything from corn to cement--and unless the world suddenly stops eating and building, the odds are this index is ripe for a stunning rebound ... that looks already underway. Today, we’re featuring an article from our friends at StreetAuthority. StreetAuthority Editor Amy Calistri explains why these shipping stocks have a bright future ahead of them while providing some monstrous yields--one shipper in particular paying a 23.2% yield.

I recently brought you an issue of Cabot Wealth Advisory that reviewed some of our most important investing lessons from the year written by three of our editors. Today, I’m going to bring you something from the rest, Timothy Lutts, Cabot publisher and editor of Cabot Stock of the Month, Paul Goodwin, editor of Cabot China & Emerging Markets Report and Michael Cintolo, editor of Cabot Top Ten Report and Cabot Market Letter. I hope this helps you tackle your next investing challenge.

Today I want to start off with a word about a certain technical indicator you’ve probably heard a lot about this week. It’s a prediction that gets made every year by Punxsutawney Phil, who sticks his head out of the ground to predict whether or not winter is here to stay. As a child, I believed in the power of the groundhog to forecast the weather. But soon I realized that it would probably be winter here for at least six more weeks. In any event, I’m not putting much stock in old Phil to forecast the seasons or anything else. We don’t do predictions here at Cabot, we watch the market and use our disciplined market timing indicators to stay on the right side of the trends.

The cynic might say that if the IRS just took a close look at the last 10 years’ tax returns of everybody in the Federal government it would scare up enough revenue to close the budget deficit by a few percentage points. Me, I’ll just repeat and elaborate on my main point. The tax laws are too complicated. Every new program, gained by earnest lobbying, that aims to fine-tune the system to benefit or penalize specific groups, only serves to make the whole process more complicated, and thus less efficient, for both the taxpayers and the overseers. And that helps nobody but the people employed in the tax industry.

First of all, I want to thank everyone who took the time to fill out the survey last weekend. We’ll try to write about many of the investment topics that you requested, so in that vein, today I’m pulling an article out of the archives that answers a question that was asked several times on the survey: How do you invest during a recession? Timothy Lutts wrote an excellent piece about this last January, yes a whole 13 months ago (long before anyone officially declared that we are in a recession), and I dug it out to share with you again here.

Doomsaying is a tricky business. In the late 1970s, when commodities were king, technical analyst Bob Prechter correctly predicted the implosion of the commodity bull market and a “‘super cycle’” bull market in equities. His eerily on-target prediction made him an investing superstar. Unfortunately, he then predicted the 1990s would be a severe bear market for stocks. I’ll admit, there is something tempting about subscribing to bleak predictions when times are tough. But there are four reasons I believe most of this dommsaying is wrong.

Today’s first topic is Steve Jobs, Apple and AAPL. Steve Jobs, of course, is the man at the head of the company. Apple is the company itself. And AAPL is the stock. They are three separate entities. But investors often make the mistake of confusing them, and that can be dangerous. The media have focused on Steve Jobs and his health and worried about the effect on the company should Steve’s health problems force him to step down. But I’m not making the mistake of thinking that if Steve returns to good health AAPL will continue to be a fine investment.

An article demonstrates how soccer goalies actually stop more penalty kicks when they stay in the center of the net, but despite these results, the goalies almost always dive right or left. Why? Because not to act is to appear helpless, as if they don’t know what to do. And so it is in the stock market, for many people, both amateurs and experts. They’re always looking to do something ... but sometimes the best course of action is inaction.

Why doesn’t economic news affect my market outlook? The reason for that can be explained in my favorite quote, which is carved on the mantel above the fireplace at Cabot: “Markets are never wrong; opinions are.” The infamous trader Jesse Livermore is responsible for this gem. Far too many investors fail to leave their egos and opinions at the door and this is the #1 reason most investors lose money, or at best produce lackluster returns.

Today I’m bringing you a Q&A with Cabot Benjamin Graham Value Letter Editor J. Royden Ward. You haven’t heard from him in a while, so I wanted to bring you up to speed on his latest thinking about what happened in 2008 and where he sees the stock market and value stocks headed in 2009 and beyond.