Japan’s current $1.4 trillion or so of inflation efforts and asset buying is creating a situation in the currency markets that we have not seen in quite some time. The last time we had dollar/yen parity was back in April 2009 when the United States stock market was bouncing heavily from the early 2009 selling climax lows. Now we see the parity challenge at a time when the Dow Jones Industrial Average (DJIA) and the S&P 500 Index are hitting all-time highs.

The moves in Japan have been unprecedented and for all practical purposes seem uncanny. The WisdomTree Japan Hedged Equity (NYSEMKT: DXJ) is up a whopping 33% so far in 2013, while the iShares MSCI Japan Index (NYSEMKT: EWJ) is up more than 20% so far in 2013.

The ProShares UltraShort Yen (NYSEMKT: YCS) exchange-traded product actually is leveraged two times (200%) of the inverse of the daily dollar price of the yen. This is up more than 31% year to date in 2013 and hit a new high since 2009.

On a personal note, would it be too much to ask the Bank of Japan to just split its currency 100-for-1 now? That would get the yen on par (or real parity) with the rest of the world’s major currencies. We won’t hold our breath on that wish.

Bart Chilton just gave a Bloomberg TV appearance calling for the CFTC and other regulators to look into regulating Bitcoin. Again, this is not a formal regulation as of yet. It is an inquiry into whether (or how) Bitcoin actually should be regulated.

Chilton told the “Bloomberg Surveillance” audience on Bloomberg TV that Bitcoin needs to be given a hard look by the United States and other nations and their regulatory agencies. He called Bitcoin a shadow currency. He has said that he is not 100% certain that Bitcoin needs to be regulated. FoxBusiness also ran a detailed effort about what the CFTC is investigating as well.

We recently said that Bitcoin’s trading crash at Mt. Gox is turning Bitcoin into BS-Coin. If Bitcoin falls under harsh regulation, it will not just BS-Coin. It would like be No-Coin.

As you might imagine, this is not exactly going to drive the value of Bitcoin higher, as you can see from the MtGox.com price graph below. The prices are as follows:

• Last price:$104.60000
• High:$122.00000
• Low:$97.52000
• Volume:150,646 BTC
• Weighted Avg:$108.42015

These changes to the bill are part of an ongoing effort to help distinguish real from fake currency. “It is a constantly evolving process of putting more and more features on the bill to allow the common citizen to detect counterfeit,” said Ed Lowery, a special agent with the Secret Service.

Click here to see the eight ways to spot counterfeit money

Most of the counterfeit notes that change hands are computer-generated, which are easily distinguishable from real bills. “The process utilized to manufacture genuine notes is so detailed that there are very few systems out there that can match that level of detail in the printing,” Lowery said. People who hold both a real bill and a counterfeit bill in their hands should be able to notice a difference in texture between the two notes. From there, they can go on to look at other factors that would separate the two bills, such as the watermark or serial number.

Making a counterfeit note has never been easier since technology is so readily available for counterfeiters to print fake money at home. However, these notes are usually of low quality and should be unable to pass muster with an informed merchant. Nevertheless, “most people don’t realize that they have counterfeit [money] until they try to make a deposit at the bank or [with] a merchant,” said Joe DeSantis, an assistant special agent with the Secret Service.

Bars and nightclubs are easy places to exchange counterfeit money since they are not well lit, said Jason Kersten, an expert on counterfeiting and the author of “The Art of Making Money: The Story of a Master Counterfeiter.” In order to combat this problem, many of these establishments are looking at notes with ultraviolet lights, which can help to detect phony bills.

Stopping counterfeits can often be as easy as knowing what to look for. To find out the features one should look for when trying to detect bad notes, 24/7 Wall St. talked to DeSantis, Lowery and Kersten, in addition to using information from the U.S. Secret Service’s “Know Your Money” campaign.

These are eight ways to spot counterfeit money.

Our case is not truly a case against the future of digital currency, or even against virtual currencies. We have supported and would continue support anything that allows the most efficient and most cost-effective method of transferring money from consumer to companies and/or consumers to peers. The problem is that the history of Digicash, eCash and other virtual currencies have never been able to stay afloat. Ditto for micropayments, with most of those exchanges having shut down as well.

After trying to go to the Mt. Gox website on Thursday before noon EST, all we saw was a 502 Bad Gateway message on the website. The translation is that its servers are not communicating properly. That website is back, up but we took a snapshot of the image to capture it.

The copy/paste function of the exchange says, “Trade with confidence on the world’s largest Bitcoin exchange! Mt.Gox is the world’s most established Bitcoin exchange. You can quickly and securely trade bitcoins with other people around the world with your local currency!” At 12:03 p.m. EST, we see the following U.S. dollar quotes from Mtgox.com:

• Last price:$94.40000
• High: $95.00000
• Low: $83.00000
• Volume: 175987 BTC
• Weighted Avg: $90.71355

Maybe it will be Amazon.com Inc. (NASDAQ: AMZN), with its own currency, that will win long term. EBay Inc. (NASDAQ: EBAY) has the wildly successful PayPal unit, but its fees can be high. Maybe the answer is merely Square and its competitors for transacting credit card payments right through your smartphone. Regardless of what the effort will be in the future, it seems unlikely to us that Bitcoin will rule the roost in the future.

How can you have a virtual currency trade at a premium or discount to intrinsic values, and then not be able to trade because the systems cannot handle the volume or because servers will not properly communicate? The answer has to be “not very long.” Keep in mind that the real world currency markets are almost 24/7, and they are the most active and most liquid of all world markets. Imagine having a currency that could be worth more or less than its real value but not being able to even trade it.

Bitcoin is losing its luster. If Bitcoin ultimately goes the way it looks today, we don’t want to take credit for assigning the name “BS-coin” to it. Sadly, “BS-coin” will likely be its name.

Here is a Bitcoin price chart from Mtgox.com:

The big call earlier last week was from Goldman Sachs Group Inc. (NYSE: GS) saying to get out of gold and to short sell gold. The highly influential trading and investment banking firm predicted that gold would end 2013 at $1450 per ounce and that it could sink to $1270 by the end of 2014. The analyst team that made this call even went on to predict that if these price predictions turn out to be correct that the falling gold prices could even be larger and faster than the firm expects.

Our question on this is the pre-trade timing of this. How much gold was Goldman Sachs selling in the two weeks before they said to short sell gold? The prior week brought about very fishy trading in gold. The rising dollar/yen story played a huge role (see Dollar/Yen parity challenge), but the selling and exits of the SPDR Gold Shares (NYSEMKT: GLD) were uncanny. This ETF is now down to just under $57.2 billion in total assets with 1,158.56 tonnes. To show the exodus, the SPDR Gold shares had assets of $59.43 billion and 1,181.4 tonnes just the day before. That is over $2.2 billion less in raw dollars and close to 22.8 tonnes that were sold out in just one day.

On Friday came another deadly call for gold, with an upside twist. Marc Faber publishes the Gloom, Boom & Doom Report and he appeared on Bloomberg Television’s “Street Smart” segment saying that gold may fall to $1300 before any real rebound. The good news is that he sees that as a great long-term entry point.

Faber said, “I love the fact that gold is finally breaking down. That will offer an excellent buying opportunity. I would just like to make one comment. At the moment, a lot of people are knocking gold down. But if we look at the records, we are now down 21% from the September 2011 high. Apple Inc. (NASDAQ: AAPL) is down 39% from last year’s high. At the same time, the S&P is at about not even up 1% from the peak in October 2007. Over the same period of time, even after today’s correction gold is up 100%. The S&P is up 2% over the March 2000 high. Gold is up 442%. So I am happy we have a sell-off that will lead to a major low. It could be at $1400, it could be today at $1300, but I think that the bull market in gold is not completed.”

Faber also said on Bloomberg Television, “$1300. Nobody knows for sure but I think the fundamentals for gold are still intact. I would like to make one additional comment. Today we have commodities breaking down including gold. At the same time we have bonds rallying very strongly. If you stand aside and you look at these two events, it would suggest that they are strongly deflationary pressures in the system. If that was the case, I wouldn’t buy stocks or sovereign bonds because the stock market would be hit by disappointing profits if there was a deflationary environment.”

One thing that we would note as a final exit to the weekend and week ahead outlook in gold. The recent silly craze we saw in Bitcoin only underpins that there is intrinsic value in gold and silver. We gave a long explanation of this market disparity on Friday. To bid up a virtual currency with no central bank and no hard assets other than a peer-to-peer value system on any given day just sounds silly. That is effectively trying to fix a value of a barter system, and it would seem silly to think that a Bitcoin in cyberspace with no real backing would be preferred over gold or even silver.

We do not really measure gold (nor silver) as a commodity compared to most other commodities. We look at gold as a hard asset that supports the value of currencies. In fact, we just think of gold as a long-term cash alternative but we do not think of it as a short-term cash or money market alternative. Could you imagine if your money market mutual funds or you bank deposits fluctuated up or down 1% or 2% each and every day? This is central bank currency and all of this newly printed money in the U.S., Japan, and elsewhere has to have something ultimately behind it.

Gold recently was called a short-sell by the strategists at Goldman Sachs. We would ask how much the firm’s position in gold changed ahead of that call. Traders were even saying last week that something fishy was happening in the gold market. And now the exodus of investors and speculators moving out of SPDR Gold Shares (NYSEMKT: GLD) is acting to drive the price of gold lower too. As a reminder, we have said over and over that if the SPDR Gold Shares was a country it would be one of the world’s top holders of gold, as it has 1,181.4 tonnes and still has a value of $59.43 billion.

Silver is often called the devil’s metal, and some even call it the poor man’s gold trade. The iShares Silver Trust (NYSEMKT: SLV) has seen waves of selling too. Still, its assets are $9.3 billion. Silver usually follows gold trends, and sometimes on a very exaggerated basis. Hence the name the devil’s metal.

Back to Bitcoin. The run-up was driven in part by the woes of Europe, but apparently thousands of traders were opening trading and merchant accounts and this caused the system to not work. The top Bitcoin exchange, called Mt. Gox, halted trading after shares rose sharply and then came crashing down again. Remember one thing, we are talking about a virtual currency here that has no central bank. It is just a peer-to-peer network of buyers and sellers of a virtual currency.

If investors and speculators are willing to drive up a virtual currency, does this not offer validity to the real value of gold and silver? Sure, gold and silver cannot exactly be sent around cyberspace all over the planet anonymously. But the government cannot just print more gold and silver. What would stop more Bitcoin currency units from being created in the future if demand remains high?

If you have been around since the Internet first started to go mainstream (or before), then the notion of a virtual currency is nothing new. All efforts so far have flopped, with the exception of PayPal, under eBay Inc. (NASDAQ: EBAY). It already has been pondered that Amazon.com Inc. (NASDAQ: AMZN) could use its new virtual currency to rival Bitcoin. The long and short is that there are just zero barriers to entry here. Another issue is what happens when cyberthieves take a Bitcoin unit. How does one get back their anonymous currency?

The current craze reminds me of the lessons of DigiCash from the 1990s that was supposed to be an anonymous virtual currency. I actually wanted that effort to work, but it was ahead of its time and there were too many concerns and technical limitations keeping it from succeeding. Then there was eCash. Now there are at least a dozen offshoots. The world of micropayments was supposed to take off 10 years ago, and Peppercoin was supposed to be a leader there. Now that domain is an insurance website, and you hardly ever hear about micropayments now. So, what is the real long-term value of a buck, virtual or real? If history doesn’t somehow change, a buck is probably worth a buck.

Do not take this to be an implied defense of the price of gold or silver on a trading trend. Just look at gold and silver prices on Friday with gold breaking $1500 and over this past week. A rising dollar is at work here, and we have even seen a challenge to dollar-yen parity. This is serious business. If the dollar keeps rising, no defense of gold and commodities is needed because the currency markets are the largest markets in the world. They are so fast that they will dominate comments and defensive posturing of any jackass like me or others out there.

Who knows where gold and silver will settle. If the trend remains, the answer is simply “lower.” Still, if people are willing to bid up and bid down a virtual currency, what does it mean for the real value of hard assets that central banks and investors still want to hold as an alternative to overly printed paper currency down the road?

Someone once named silver  the devil’s metal and we love that name. The craze in Bitcoin is likely to end leaving the name for Bitcoin as ”the sucker’s currency.”

Imagine if Bitcoin does somehow get to make it and the value of a buck is no longer a buck. Someone will have to create a Bitcoin ETF that trades on a real stock exchange.

The US Dollar is now at 99.85 Yen and the last time we had Dollar/Yen parity was back in April 2009 when the United States stock market was bouncing heavily from the early 2009 selling climax lows. And now we are seeing the parity challenge at a time when the DJIA and the S&P 500 Index are hitting all-time highs.

The moves in Japan have been unprecedented and for all practical purposes seem uncanny. The WisdomTree Japan Hedged Equity (NYSEMKT: DXJ) is up a whopping 26% so far in 2013, while the iShares MSCI Japan Index (NYSEMKT: EWJ) is up 15% so far in 2013.

The ProShares UltraShort Yen (NYSEMKT: YCS) exchange-traded product is actually leveraged two-times (200%) of the inverse of the daily dollar price of the Yen. This is up over 30% year to date in 2013 and hit a new high since 2009.

On a personal note, would it be too much to ask the Bank of Japan to just split its currency 100-for-1 now? That would get the yen on par (or real parity) with the rest of the world’s major currencies. We won’t hold our breath on that wish.

If you look below you can see the five-year chart from Bloomberg on the Dollar/Yen.

24/7 Wall St. has created a brief calendar of the major earnings announcements by day. Estimates have come from Thomson Reuters, although we would quickly point out that estimates may change at any time and may have likely changed marginally by the time mid-week gets here. We have also provided color on each.

This week we saw three of our ten suppositions come up which were in our Ten Things That Could Wreck The Bull Market. We also issued a quarter-end piece that was intended to act as the Blueprint for the Bull Market In April as well. Lastly, here are our DJIA dividend hike predictions for April as earnings season kicks off.

One thing needs to be addressed and this has not yet been covered enough by much of the financial press. The strength of the U.S. dollar will impact US exports and that will be something that companies either address that came up of late or which will impact earnings in the second quarter outlook.

Alcoa Inc. (NYSE: AA) will be the first of the DJIA components to report earnings for the first quarter of 2013. Investors always try to use this as a barometer but we would warn against putting so much faith in “The Alcoa Indicator” because the company is troubled and in a hard industry to boot. Look for Alcoa to maintain that the aluminum industry will still be double by the end of this decade. Estimates are $0.10 EPS and a 1.2% drop in revenue to $5.93 billion. Alcoa used to say “You Make The Call” on commercials, but now it simply asks “What Bull Market?” because its stock is down about 5% so far in 2013.

Bed Bath & Beyond Inc. (NASDAQ: BBBY) is set to report on Wednesday and this stock has tried to recover from its past earnings blunders. Estimates are for a 13% earnings gain to $1.68 EPS and a 24% sales gain to $3.4 billion. This retailer’s stock price is up 13% so far in 2013.

Carmax Inc. (NYSE: KMX) will also give us the first real look at auto sale earnings. The car dealer is expected to report earnings of $0.46 EPS on a 10% gain in sales to $2.73 billion. Carmax shares are up 10% so far in 2013.

Also Read: 19 Stocks Expected to Rise 50% to 100%

J B Hunt Transport Services Inc. (NASDAQ: JBHT) will lead the transportation sector earnings with its report on Thursday. The trucker is not always a true proxy, but investors will try to garner what it means for trucking players, then perhaps for rail players, and perhaps even air freight shippers. Estimates are $0.64 EPS on a gain of almost 11% in revenues to $1.29 billion. Just keep in mind that this stock is up a sharp 22% so far in 2013.

Family Dollar Stores Inc. (NYSE: FDO) will report earnings Wednesday and will lead the dollar store chains ahead. Due to a sharp drop right after the first of the year, this stock is down about 6.5% so far in 2013. The dollar store owner and operator is expected to report earnings of $1.23 EPS and a 17% sales gain to $2.89 billion.

J.P. Morgan Chase & Co. (NYSE: JPM) will report earnings on Friday morning. The bank with the fortress balance sheet is expected to report earnings of $1.38 EPS but revenue is expected to be down 5% at $25.96 billion. Book value is $51.30 per share and shares are up just a hair under 10% so far this year despite shares pulling back 6% from the fresh highs.

Wells Fargo & Co. (NYSE: WFC) is also reporting Friday morning and its shares have pulled back about 4% off their highs, but this remains the safest of the big safest banks in America and its stock is still up almost 10% so far in 2013. Estimates are $0.88 EPS on expected flat revenue of $21.58 billion. Wells Fargo trades above its book value.

The good news here is that the move will keep a meltdown from happening in Cyprus. Some of the wealthy Russians and other foreign depositors are not going to like this deal one bit, as a large portion of their deposit assets will be used for the deal.

The good news for America and for most of the rest of the Western hemisphere is that the nation of Cyprus can go back to being completely irrelevant and of no concern whatsoever to the rest of us. The CIA World Factbook lists Cyprus as having a whopping 1.15 million souls, and its 2012 gross domestic product for 2012 was forecast to be about $23.57 billion, on a purchasing power parity with a world GDP rank of 125. In short, Cyprus would be a small company on the S&P 500 Index if it was a public stock. Its GDP per capita was estimated to be the equivalent of $26,900.

Cyprus joined the European Exchange Rate Mechanism in May 2005, and it adopted the euro as its national currency at the start of 2008, just in time for the recession. The nation’s GDP breakdown has only 2.4% agriculture, 16.7% industry and 80.9% services. Services would be tourism and banking.

National Bank of Greece S.A. (NYSE: NBG) traded up 10% in overseas on trading on last look.

S&P 500 futures are up seven points and DJIA futures are up about 40 points. Stocks in France and Germany are both up more than 1% today.

Several banks were very close to meeting all of our financial, historic and transformative criteria, and they may be eligible for the list of safest banks in 2014, or even after the stress tests and after decisions have been formalized over returning capital to shareholders. Some of the data may seem investor oriented, but the reality is that institutional depositors, creditors and trading partners generally evaluate peers with many of the same metrics. The global economic recovery has lost some steam at the same time that the stock market has recovered. The public needs to know which of the larger banks are safe, regardless whether the economy stabilizes or worsens again.

The criteria to be among the safest banks has to be very strict by nature. It also has to apply to the larger institutions, which are either money-center banks or have multiple-state geographies. To make the list, a bank either had to have a minimum of 100 branches or it had to have retail branches in multiple states as the base level for relevance and importance. We used banks with a minimum market capitalization of $3 billion and a minimum asset base of $20 billion. These safest banks had to have the bulk of their image tied to retail and commercial banking operations with many branch offices (probably eliminate, we said above). This eliminated the great fiduciary banks such as State Street Corp. (NYSE: STT) and Bank of New York Mellon Corp. (NYSE: BK), even though they certainly would be considered among the safest banks. It also eliminated the bank holding companies with no retail banking operations, such as Goldman Sachs Group Inc. (NYSE: GS) and Morgan Stanley (NYSE: MS).

24/7 Wall St. took a “Made in America” approach as well, and we screened out U.S. banking outfits that are actually subsidiaries of foreign banks. We also screened out the banks that were still in the process of making large, game-changing or transformative acquisitions, which are too difficult to evaluate in order to avoid absorbing any hidden or unknown risks.

With credit ratings becoming a risk again after a U.K. sovereign downgrade, and on the heels of the fiscal cliff and spending sequestration, all these banks also had to be considered investment grade by the major credit ratings agencies. A minimum hurdle of a 7.0% return on equity had to be seen, and we included the return on assets in this analysis as well. These safest banks had to have a minimum divided yield of 2.0% for their common stockholders, as proof that management believes that it can continue returning capital to shareholders through good and bad times, while still maintaining normal operations.

We screened out the nondiversified banks to avoid too many fluctuations throughout the business cycles. For an investment angle, we also gave preference to the banks where Wall St. analysts have a consensus price target above the current share price, indicating that some underlying value potentially remains. If a bank’s common stock was less than $10.00 per share, it had to have its metrics well above average among the largest banks.

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While Bank of America Corp. (NYSE: BAC) was the best performing of the 30 Dow Jones Industrial Average stocks in 2012, it and the money-center banking giant Citigroup Inc. (NYSE: C) actually do not qualify to be in the safest banks in America, even though the reality is that these banks are almost certain to survive another recession. The Federal Reserve deems them to still be problem banks, and they have so far not been freed up to raise their dividends or to increase share buybacks. That may change ahead, and the reality is that these banks are believed to be strong enough to weather most negative scenarios under the impending stress tests.

Finally, we eliminated banks that we did not feel would survive another recession. Consumers have to keep their money somewhere other than under their mattresses. Having an extremely safe bank to protect your hard-earned cash, nest-eggs and safety deposit boxes in hard times is much more important than how high of a rate depositors can get on certificates of deposit and in their checking and savings accounts. As far as quality is concerned, Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway Inc. (NYSE: BRK-A) has large stakes in three of the seven safest banks.

In mid-2012, banking regulators proposed to incorporate Basel III capital changes for substantially all U.S. banking organizations. Our list of safest banks shows the Tier-1 ratio today as well as the company’s projected Tier-1 ratio under the proposed rules. This also helps to eliminate any problems over safety and vulnerability ahead. If Basel III is finally adopted as proposed, the threshold for the Tier 1 common equity ratio will be 7%, consisting of a minimum level plus a capital conservation buffer.

Based on the analysis, we anticipate that future lists of the safest banks in America may include 10 or even 12 banks, rather than seven, because many banks only missed one criteria yet exceeded other hurdles handily. We still are not evaluating the community or single-region banks due to size or single geography risks. That being said, many of those community banks have better ratios than any of the larger safest banks in America.

This is the 24/7 Wall St. list of the seven safest banks in America for 2013 to deposit money into, ranked in order of safety, size by assets, and reach.  Our rank is based on financial stability, size by assets, and by reach.