For the past year we have seen records of all kinds made in the economy and stock market - from the depth of market crashes, to heights in the price of oil, big rallies in the stock market, and now a big drop in consumer prices.

On Thursday right before CNBC reported on rumors of the bank bailout plan, Ben Bernanke was meeting with lawmakers and selling the plan to them. Inside a conference room that is part of Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi's office he was meeting with the Congressional leadership.

I went out of town last week to the Resource Investment Conference in Las Vegas. I'll get to that in a second, but so much is happening that this is going to be a longer message than usual. This weekend we are seeing Lehman go broke, Merrill Lynch in a desperate buyout, AIG try to fend of bankruptcy, and a frightening gap down in the market this morning.

On Thursday the DOW fell over 300 points. I made a killing on my short stock trading positions, but gold stocks fell hard too. Luckily I got stopped out for a small loss the day before, but nonetheless I don't like seeing gold and commodities drop at all here.

Andy Emerson and I just put together this video on gold stocks. The last video we put together was very timely, because we did it in May two weeks before the S&P 500 peaked and warned people to get out. Now we have a message that is just as important when it comes to gold stocks.

After falling 40 dollars Monday morning and dragging the HUI down 20 points there are some short-term technical signs that gold may be near a bottom of some sorts. First gold finally fell down hard one morning to start to catch up with the steep drop we have seen in gold stocks.

I did a podcast call with Matt Frailey to talk about gold stocks and the broad market. To listen you can right click this link and download the mp3 file to your computer:

Podcast mp3 file - Matt Frailey and Mike Swanson talk about the broad market and gold stocks.

Last Wednesday morning I wrote an article titled "Gold Stocks are Near a Key Bottom." When I put the article together I was looking for a bottom in gold stocks to put my own money to use in.

I believe the next few days are going to be key days for gold stocks just as May was a key time for the S&P 500 and the broad market. If you were following me then you'll know that I took short positions against the general market back in May. However I did not short at the exact top.

While the broad market fell last week gold rallied hard. For the past few weeks we've seen gold and gold stocks held down as various US Federal Reserve officials have talked more hawkish about inflation and market analysts have predicted future rate hikes from the Fed later this year.