Americans love to gamble. We have our Vegas, our horse track racing, sports betting, and even weird sports betting (for instance, betting on how long the national anthem will be at the Super Bowl, which was a hot topic this past year). But with any gamble there are risks. That's why you gamble, right? Win big, lose big, and Americans love doing things big. That gets us to the reason for this article, the upcoming gold bust. Gold is a hot commodity right now and has been for some time, but hot commodities are always hot before a big bust. The hotter it is, the bigger the bust, and right now it is hotter than hot.

I'm not trying to scare people into not investing in gold, but I also don't think you should throw every dime you have into it (although, if you had a couple years ago it would have worked out great for you). Unfortunately in America (and the rest of the world, since the gold boom isn't just an American thing), we forget our previous bust rather quickly when there' s something new that promises to be a money maker. After the dot-com bubble burst in 2000 we moved on to housing, and we all know how well that worked out. The housing market busted (big time) after years of it making substantial gains well beyond what it should have and now we're on to our next bubble: gold.

Using the handy charts at Kitco.com you can see that way back in August, 2001 gold was sitting around $268/ounce. Fast-forward 10 years and it's currently hovering around $1,800/ounce. Looking at just the month of August in the years in-between and you'll find that gold was anywhere from $300 - $680/ounce from 2002 - 2007. At that point the world economy started to deteriorate (in Europe and America at least) and you suddenly had a big boom in gold prices. So much so that you can't drive more than a few miles in any major city without seeing a "we buy gold" sign hanging in front of a pawn store or, as odd as it may seem, a barbershop.

The signs of an upcoming bust are all there: people buying gold in large doses, more and more gold entering the market, and rampant speculation on gold prices. You can be sure of it, eventually the gold bubble will burst. Is it set to burst right away? Probably not, it could very well hit $2,000/ounce. You could roll the dice right now and invest all you have in gold and still make a small killing, but you could also roll snake eyes and wind up with nothing. But that's the allure, that you can strike it rich without a lot of effort. Whatever you do, just don't say you weren't warned when you hear the pop.