Five for the Weekend #60

With the weeks flying by in 2009, let's get right to this installment of five items for your review over the next couple of days.

• I'm among those who have pointed out that Charlie Rose conducts some of the very best interviews of business leaders on his nightly PBS show. This has always been the case, such as his hour-long sit-down with John Templeton in the 1990s. And his status has gained in this arena with the financial meltdown. Fortune has an excellent profile of Rose that I highly recommend.

• Alice Schroeder has an interesting take on gold in her latest Bloomberg column. She reports not owning the metal, which makes her piece even more worthwhile in some ways: "Enter the gold bugs. They aren’t just betting on inflation, as is the conventional wisdom. Gold has a wicked history of being an unreliable inflation hedge. It has, though, at times been a haven against sudden currency depreciation." As you know, I own the SPDR Gold ETF (GLD).

• Marty Whitman of the Third Avenue Value Fund has been big on Hong Kong stocks for a while now. This CNN Money article covers that, plus some other places he's spotting value. I own Cheung Kong Holdings ADR (CHEUY), which has been a large Whitman holding but which isn't mentioned in the linked article.

• Meredith Whitney writes an op-ed in The Wall Street Journal, asserting that the credit crunch is continuing: "The next phase will likely be credit-line cuts as lenders race to pre-emptively protect themselves from regulatory changes associated with the Credit Card Accountability, Responsibility and Disclosure Act, passed in May of this year, and the 2008 Unfair and Deceptive Acts and Practices Act." This is available on RealClearMarkets.com, so you shouldn't have to be a WSJ.com subscriber to access it.

• Back to Bloomberg, John Wasik asks if someone can profit from being an eco-investor: "There are really only two ways of doing it now. You can buy a risky sector fund or stock and hold on to it for dear life over the next few years. Or you can invest in your home. Of the two, I prefer a home investment because the incentives have never been better and there’s no market risk. All the green funds got creamed last year."

Remember, I post articles I find interesting or fun reads. Doesn't mean I endorse or agree with everything various writers express. And with that, have a great weekend.