This coming week will be a humdinger for the markets. The Federal Reserve is expected to begin a second round of quantitative easing and voters will deliver their verdict on the economy in mid-term elections. Both events will have ramifications for investors and stock markets worldwide.

The Fed's decision to further stimulate the economy via a second round of quantitative easing (QE II) has already been priced into the market, in my opinion, but the impact of the mid-term elections has not. If the Republicans gain a majority in the House and additional seats in the Senate, as many political pundits predict, then the markets have reason to rally in the months, if not weeks ahead.

For me, the question is when, not if, the markets will gain more ground. Stocks (and some commodities) are somewhat overbought right now and looking for an excuse to pull back. Maybe the election results will precipitate a "sell-on-the-news" reaction in the very short term. The question I ask is whether the lame-duck Congress will give investors an added excuse to sell?

Most readers are aware that the Bush tax cuts are scheduled to expire in 2010. Will Congress act to extend those cuts before the end of the year? If it does (by extending the tax cuts for many, if not all, Americans), then the markets could see substantial gains. On the other hand, if nothing is done and the tax cuts are allowed to expire than we may be in for a period of uncertainty.

Since I have been attending Charles Schwab's yearly investor conference in Boston this week, it was a good opportunity to take the pulse of the best and brightest on Wall Street as they shared their views of the market and economy. Clearly, just about everyone I talked to is bullish. Not once did I hear the term "double-dip recession," and for the most part, just about everyone was looking for strong markets between now and at least the second quarter of 2011.

In addition, no one likes bonds, especially U.S. Treasury bonds. "Bubble" was the term most often used when describing the $70 trillion investors have stashed away in the bond market. Most argue that the perceived safety that investors see in bonds is an illusion. The investment team from Gameco Investors Inc. headed by famed value investor Mario Gabelli argued that bonds are "in the ninth inning of a 30-year run" providing holders with little yield, no growth prospects and a mountain of interest rate risk. In addition, "Money markets are also not as safe as you think," said Gabelli.

He points out that the $2.8 trillion in money-market funds has a great deal of dollar risk in the form of depreciation, inflation and debasement, besides offering little in the way of yield or growth.

Currency wars was also a leading topic of discussion with most participants believing the battle between nations to keep their currencies weak will continue. The prognosis for the greenback is more weakness ahead as America attempts to export its way to greater growth. As a result, U.S. companies that export are in vogue, especially technology stocks.

Gold, precious metals and commodities in general was an area of heated arguments, with some dismissing the recent run ups as irresponsible speculation while others read the price moves as a rationale answer to declining currencies and the inevitable rise in inflation that lurks just around the corner.

Emerging markets are once again in favor as an area for long-term investment. Bulls point to the increasing percentage of global GDP (49 percent) represented by these fast-growing economies as opposed to what they consider is an underrepresented share of the world's stock market capitalization (only 31 percent).

In the minus column, financial stocks stood out as an area that won't regain its pre-2008 luster anytime soon, neither will consumer discretionary stocks. In both cases, these sectors suffer from the deleveraging that is under way among American consumers. Banks, whose major business is making loans to customers, will experience low growth since Americans are trying to reduce, not increase, their debt as a percentage of their personal income. Consumers are reducing that debt by cutting back on their discretionary spending.

All in all the tone was upbeat at the conference and it felt that business was beginning to get back to normal after several years of strife. Whether that is a good thing when discussing the financial services sector is a matter of opinion.

Bill Schmick is an independent investor with Berkshire Money Management. (See "About" for more information.) None of the information presented in any of these articles is intended to be and should not be construed as an endorsement of BMM or a solicitation to become a client of BMM. The reader should not assume that any strategies, or specific investments discussed are employed, bought, sold or held by BMM. Direct your inquiries to Bill at 1-888-232-6072 (toll free) or e-mail him at wschmick@fairpoint.net. Visit www.afewdollarsmore.com for more of Bill's insights.

Over the last year, a number of baby boomers I know have explored the option of early retirement. Between the financial crises, the recession and the volatility of the stock markets, burnout has hit the over-60 crowd. They yearn for a less stressful life and believe that early retirement is the answer. My advice is don't do it.

The first factor to consider is whether you can afford to retire. The last two years have put a large dent in most tax-deferred savings plans. Some of that damage has been repaired, but by no means all, with most savers still down 20-25 percent from the peak value of their portfolios. All indications are that it will take several more years before the value of our investible assets fully recover.

"I still have my Social Security to fall back on," argued a 62-year-old engineer from a large Berkshire company, headquartered in the center of the county.

"Yes," I said, "but if you wait another eight years, you could pull in a heck of a lot more."

It is true that retired workers can begin collecting Social Security benefits at 62. But your benefits are reduced by as much as 30 percent if you do. Those born between 1943 and 1954 receive full benefits at age 66. The full retirement age increases gradually after that and for those born after 1960 the retirement age is now 67.

Take me for example: I'm 61, born in 1948, and plan to retire sometime after 70. Why?

Well, I could tell you I love my job, (which is true) and that I also love to write. Beyond that, it does not make any economic sense for me to retire before that. For every year I postpone retirement my Social Security benefits increase by 8 percent. A 32 percent increase in benefits over four years is not pocket change.

I also plan to continue working after I start claiming my benefits. Let's say Joe planned to retire next year, at 62. He can earn up to $14,160 without paying a penalty. Any more than that, however, and Social Security deducts 50 cents on every dollar from his benefits. If Joe waits until his retirement age of 66, his earnings limit climbs to $37,680 and the penalty for earning over that is reduced to 33 cents on the dollar. If Joe were to wait just one year longer, there would be no limit or penalty at all.

Since Social Security benefits are calculated based on your 35 highest years of earnings, and many of us are in our highest earnings years right now. It pays us to continue to earn more and bump up our earnings as much as we can.

There are also advantages if you are married. Spouses are entitled to Social Security payments of up to 50 percent of the higher earner's check provided they wait until full retirement age. Since it's still a man's world, I have made more than my wife throughout our working careers. Since we both work, we can claim spousal payments and individual payments and do so at different times.

My wife Barbara is 10 years younger than me. So let's says I retire at 70 percent. She can then claim a spousal payment of 50 percent at that time and then switch to payments based on her own work record a decade later. Those payments will be much higher because she chose to delay her own retirement until she was 70.

Today's boomers are in better shape, have less physically demanding jobs and higher salaries than any preceding generation before them. By working longer, we oldsters increase the productivity of the American economy, provide the workplace with leadership and creativity and reduce the burden of Social Security deficits and the high cost of Medicare on younger generations. Putting off retirement as long as you can makes a great deal of sense both individually and for the country overall. Who knows, you may live longer as well.

With one quarter of the companies in the S&P 500 already reporting, third quarter earnings have been a positive surprise. Eighty-six percent have exceeded earnings estimates and 67 percent have posted higher revenue numbers. What the numbers don't say is that most of those gains have come from overseas.

The revenue number is where we should focus our attention. Higher earnings can be achieved by simply continuing to cut costs (by firing workers, for example). However, looking at the revenue numbers gives us a clear understanding of where the growth is coming from. Not much of it is coming from the home front. A lot of that growth is coming from higher sales in Asia and other emerging markets.

Since the bottom of the recent recession here in America, the majority of firms in the S&P 500 have been exporting their way into profitability. This quarter was no different. Take United Parcel Services; it is one of the companies that investors consider a good barometer of the global economy because it delivers products everywhere. UPS showed a 3.5 percent increase in growth versus last year here at home while their international growth was 13.7 percent. Many other companies are experiencing the same phenomenon.

Clearly, the falling dollar has helped exports as has the increasing strength in emerging market economies, particularly in Asia. And this weekend all eyes will be focused on the latest round of G20 talks in Seoul, where the ongoing battle to "beggar they neighbor" will continue. We can expect currencies to be one of the main topics of conversation since our own U.S. Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner has already fired the first broadside. In an open letter he has asked members to "refrain from exchange rate policies designed to achieve competitive advantage by either weakening their currency or preventing appreciation of undervalued currency."

In last week's column, "The Coming Currency War," I explained how the world's governments are using their currencies to increase exports at the expense of their neighbors. Clearly, U.S. third-quarter earnings underscore how our own policies have aided and abetted U.S. companies in exporting more. This makes Secretary Geithner's request look a bit suspect in my opinion. It will be interesting to see the response of other governments.

I mentioned last week that I was waiting for commodities, specifically gold and silver, to pull back. I expected that pullback to be sharp, and it has been. After hitting a high of $1,380 an ounce, gold dropped as low as $1,317 an ounce in what felt like a blink of the eye. Silver also had a commensurate move downward. As expected, a rise in the dollar was the catalyst for that pullback. Traders will wait until they see the results of this weekend's G20 meet before going back into precious metals or other commodities.

There is always the risk that some new policy initiative could strengthen the dollar and thus continue the commodity sell-off. It could happen, but I wouldn't hold my breath. There are few new policy alternatives on the table in Washington to revive the economy so my bet is that after a brief period of strength, the dollar will resume its decline, gold and other commodities will continue higher and so will the stock market. Under that scenario, we are back to buying the dips. Invest accordingly.

This week one of my clients asked me to explain the ongoing foreclosure debacle in "plain English" as she put it. It dawned on me that there may be a lot of readers out there who would benefit from the same thing, so here goes.

The first point to understand is that homeowners can only be foreclosed and evicted by the person or institution that actually holds the mortgage loan note. That noteholder is the only entity that has the legal authority to ask the courts to foreclose and evict the mortgageholder. That note is what you sign and give to the original lender, promising to pay the loan back over 10-20-30 years. It is that note (not the mortgage) that is the important legal document.

Back in the day, before mortgage-backed securities and loan securitization, most mortgage loans were issued by your local S&L or bank. The note stayed with the local financial institution who serviced the loan, just like in the movie "It's a Wonderful Life."

Then some Wall Street rocket scientists decided to modernize that business. Since all mortgageholders are not the same and some are riskier than others, these Gordon Gekko-lookalikes decided there was a buck to be made in wholesaling mortgage loans to investors hungry for higher-yield securities. Wall Street bought these mortgage loans off the banks and bundled them into huge pools called Real Estate Mortgage Investment Conduits (REMICs). At that point, these mortgages were spliced and diced into tranches according to their risk, (among other variables). The REMICS never owned the mortgage notes, but were simply re-packaging the mortgage loans, taking a fee and selling them to others.

Investors bought these loans, which were separated into a whole range of tranches according to how much risk the investor wanted to take on. What is important to understand is that each tranche holder owned a portion of the same mortgage, rather than investor A owning my mortgage and investor B holding yours. If my mortgage defaulted and you owned a junior (riskier) tranche of my mortgage (times many, many more) then you would be hit with that loss first. If there was still some loss left over, the more senior (safer) tranche holder would take a hit as well. It was physically impossible, even if the sellers owned the notes, to divide them fractionally between thousands if not millions of buyers. So once again these mortgages (tranches) were sold but not the notes.

Imagine the complexity of keeping track of what mortgages were defaulting versus those that were not and how much loss to assign each individual trancheholder? Enter the Mortgage Electronic Registration System (MERS), which became the repository for millions of digitized mortgage notes that all the financial institutions originated from the actual mortgage loans signed by you and me. These digitalized mortgage notes were sliced and diced and rearranged once again and came out the other end as mortgage-backed securities. The problem was that MERS didn't actually hold the mortgage notes either. And therein lies the rub. Legally, the chain of title for these mortgage loans has been broken a couple of times.

As I've explained, the key document in taking out a mortgage is the note. In order for that note to be sold or transferred to someone else (for example, transformed into a mortgage-backed security), the note has to be physically endorsed over to the next person. If it isn't, the chain of title is broken. If the chain is broken than legally the mortgage note is no longer valid. The person who took out the mortgage no longer owes the loan, because he no longer knows who to pay. In my opinion, I still believe that everyone has an obligation to repay money they have borrowed, otherwise, the entire system of credit will disintegrate.

Of course, with the number of foreclosures that have hit the nation, this issue was bound to be discovered as homeowners began to contest eviction. The banks, realizing their error, hired foreclosure mills, (legal firms that specialized in foreclosures), to remedy the problem. Accusations that these foreclosure mills actually went back and falsified documents in order to repair the broken chain of titles caught the attention of attorneys-general throughout the nation as did stories of robo-signers who were signing their names to foreclosure documents that attested that they had reviewed the loan documents when they hadn't.

In an election year, this issue has disrupted everything to do with the mortgage markets from foreclosure to new home sales. Everyone from the White House, the Justice Department, the U.S. Treasury and the Housing Departments are announcing task forces to dig deeply into this mess. In my opinion, the digger they deep the worse the true story will become so stay tuned.

No, QE II is not the name of a cruise ship; although it might as well be, given the upward ride it is providing the stock market. The Federal Reserve is expected to launch another quantitative stimulus effort in early November and the markets are rising in anticipation of that event.

On Friday, Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke reiterated that the central bank is ready to move if necessary to stimulate the economy. Investors are assuming it's a question of "when" and not "if" the Fed will move to buy additional U.S. Treasury bonds, mortgage-backed securities and whatever else they decide will provide additional impetus to a slow-growth economy.

In an election year, where the continuing high rate of unemployment and the ongoing housing mess is being blamed on the Democrats, the pressure on the Fed for a QE II must be enormous. Remember, at the end of the day, Bernanke is a political appointee, as are the members of the Fed's governing board. Sure, we would like to think that the Fed is an independent body focused solely on the economic health of America and it is most of the time.

On the other hand, if the president's wishes dovetail with what the Fed perceives to be necessary in helping the economy so much the better.

In my last few market columns, I explained that QE II was a game changer. The Fed, by promising additional stimulus, is providing investors with a "put" on the economy and therefore on the stock market. If the economy continues to grow on its own, the markets will go higher. If the economy falters, the Fed will intervene to fix it and the markets will go higher. What's not to like about that?

The arguments on whether we really do need another stimulus, will QE II really work, and will it add to the potential for more inflation down the road are consuming a forest of newsprint. In the meantime, investors are dumping the dollar (see my latest column "The Coming Currency Wars"), the markets forge steadily higher and commodities of all kinds are on fire.

As readers recall, only a month ago I raised my price target for gold to $1,350 per ounce. We have already surpassed that level and it looks like the yellow metal will hit $1,400 per ounce very soon. I'm going to have to raise my price target again but first I would like to see gold and other commodities pull back.

The dollar is key to any commodity correction. There is an inverse relationship between the dollar and commodities. The dollar may bounce over the next few weeks and if it does, that should cause commodities in general to pull back. Remember too that in the commodity arena, corrections are extremely sharp where prices can drop dramatically in a very short time.

As the S&P 500 Index flirts with the 1,180 level, I would expect a bit of resistance before the bulls make a dash toward the year's highs. The ongoing questions over housing foreclosures that have embroiled most of the banking sector this week has kept a lid on the averages. The next Fed meeting won't be until early November so any potential QEII is still weeks away. The main market moving catalyst we face is this quarter's earnings announcements. So far, company results have been a mixed bag. My advice is to let the markets pull back a bit before committing any more money to this party.