We are attending a conference here in France…happy to be back on the terra firma of the continent. Not that we don't like our new life in London…but the French are funnier to watch. And the women are better looking.

Yesterday, we went to mass at the nearby Catholic Church…the poor priest had an uphill slog. The Bible reading was about money. "A man cannot serve two masters," he quoted the Nazarene. Clearly, there is a choice to be made. But put the question to a random group of Americans, French, or English…in 2007…we're not sure which way it will go.

Meanwhile, back in the world of money itself…everything still looks pretty good - that is, if you don't look too hard. The Dow rose again on Friday. The euro (EUR) is still over $1.40.

Wheat, soybeans, oil, gold - and a whole host of other items - are at all-time highs. All of this bodes well for those who have properly invested in commodities. These high prices are transforming the physical world.

In Brazil, the Amazon jungle is being pushed back so planters can grow soybeans. Environmentalists all over the planet are whining about it, but the Brazilians reply: "Hey, this is our jungle; we'll do what we want…besides, we need the money."

In neighboring Argentina, the poor cattle are being pushed back too - up to the north…to drier, less fertile land. The regular stock often can't stand the shock…so the breed is being mixed with hardier races, such as the Indian Brahmin. The mixed-breed beasts can cope with the tougher conditions, but they yield a meat of lower quality. Why take the cows off the good land? Because it is being used to grow wheat and soybeans, of course.

Ireland has gotten rich, too - thanks to a property boom. There, the ugly, old cement-gray houses of the pre-boom era are being replaced by ugly, new cement-gray houses.

London seems to change everyday…with new restaurants…new buildings…new hedge-funds. There is so much money bubbling around the city that hustlers work overtime to figure out how to take it from its rightful owners.

But it is in Asia, where most of the change is happening. Whole cities are rising up, like mushrooms, from the good earth of the middle kingdom. Whole populations - hundreds of millions of people - are on the move, from country shanties to in-town tenements. Whole new industries are waking up to a New China, with a middle class…and millions of rich people too. It is the greatest leap forward ever! China's auto and truck exports alone are set to grow by 46% this year.

We spoke to a young man here who believes that the key to making money in large U.S. companies actually lies in Asia.

"U.S. companies aren't going to make much money by selling more product to Americans. Americans don't have any money. As you keep pointing out, U.S. wages haven't gone up in a long time…and they're not going to go up either - because that's the other half of the equation. A company with a good product - especially a good brand - can make a lot of money now by doing two things. One is lowering its costs by outsourcing labor to Asia…not just manufacturing, but even high-level things like design, research, marketing, legal work. The other thing it has to do is to sell its products to this huge rising market of the Asian middle class.

"If it does these two things, it will have lower costs and higher revenues. If it doesn't do these two things, it will be stuck with high costs…and a stagnant market - at best. Actually, as the housing problem deepens in the United States, you'd expect domestic sales to fall."

"Mortgage troubles here to stay," reports the Minneapolis paper.

He's probably right. While the average American will probably grow poorer - in both relative and absolute terms - many U.S. companies will probably do quite well. Many already are.

Psst…want to know how to build a small fortune by investing?

Start with a big one!

But if you don't have a big one, the best you can do is to try to hold on to the small one you make in your business or your career. The average rate of return over the very long-term is only a couple percentage points higher than the inflation rate. Put in a couple stock market crashes…a couple bankruptcies…a couple bad decisions…and a couple crooked investment managers, and you're lucky to end up with about as much as you had when you started.

There are times when the investing world becomes so dangerous that the most likely rate of return for the average investor will be negative. That is a good time to hold gold; your rate of return will almost certainly be better than actually investing! Gold is a hedge against the unknown…against risks…against error. But like any insurance, it costs money. When you hold gold, you give up the yield you would otherwise get from stock dividends or bond coupons. Now that Bernanke has cut short-term rates, the cost of holding gold has gone down.

Is now the time to buy gold? The money supply in the United States is rising at a rate nearly five times the growth of the economy itself. The Fed, claiming that inflation is now under control, has just cut the price of credit to member banks by half a percentage point. The economic explorer has to rub his eyes and look twice; he can't quite believe it. How can inflation be under control when prices for key commodities - notably the keyest commodity, oil - are at record levels? He doesn't have an answer, but he can put two and two together. Whatever kind of 'flation' the Fed has been cooking up, we're going to get more of it. So put on your best bib and tucker, dear reader.

Central bankers - both in the United States and in Britain - had two battles on their hands. They could continue the fight against inflation…holding rates steady, or actually increasing them. Or, they could do an about-face, and fire away at the kind of flation with a 'de' in front of it.

"Which way is scarier?" asks the Wall Street Journal.

"It depends," is our answer. If we were the central bank of China or Japan - with hundreds of billions of dollars in our vaults - we'd probably think the war had taken a nasty turn. Instead of helping to defend our number one asset, the Fed and the BOE are now working to destroy it.

If, on the other hand, we owed hundreds of billions of dollars to Asian creditors, or had a big position in the yen carry trade, or a house in Florida that we couldn't quite afford - we'd give the latest Fed move a big "hoorah!"

Here, we give it neither thumbs up…nor thumbs down. We sit on both our thumbs…buy gold…and wait to see what happens next.

The poor parish priest made a good try. He began by explaining what he was up against:

"This is a difficult passage for us, of course. Here we have Christ telling the story of an overseer who is about to be fired by his master. Seeing that he will need a little support from someone, he goes to people who owe his master money. He makes deals with them, reducing what they owe to the master so that they will owe the overseer a favor. In effect, he is cheating his own master.

"But Christ goes on to say that 'you can't serve two masters;' you can serve God, or you can serve money. Not both.

"We don't quite understand why Christ seems to approve of cheating the master out of what was rightfully his. It poses a problem for us, because we think cheating is wrong. But Christ often poses very difficult situations…forcing us to think deeply about what our duty to God (as opposed to our duty to our fellow man, and money) really is. This story requires us to recognize that the deals made by men, deals involving wealth, power, and money…are always less important than the deals we make with God.

"The overseer was being fired…we can imagine that he had died, in order to understand this better. After he has left his earthly master's employment, he has to face a new master, God himself. And that is the relationship that counts. He has to think of THAT master…of THAT obligation…even to the point of doing things that seem to us not to be quite right. The master that must be served is the one that is waiting for you after he leaves his current situation…which, of course, is our life on this Earth."

It was the best a priest could do.

Bill Bonner is the President of Agora Publishing. For more on Bill Bonner, visit The Daily Reckoning.