…Calmly observing the changing world

This evening, I attempted to watch Obama’s address to Congress, which (on my Tivo) CBS had inappropriately labeled “State of the Union”. After nearly fainting at the dreadful commentary by the CBS reporters (I don’t watch much news), I quickly fast-forwarded to the President’s speech. As I watched Obama, I could perceive none of the [...]

While in New York, visiting my fiancée and starting to sift through the wedding details, I got some grim news. Federal regulators swooped down Friday night and closed another bank – the 14th bank failure of 2009. I didn’t actually care about that – Friday night bank failures have become routine. What made it grim [...]

There are some moments in history that really matter. Others, however, are completely pointless. One of those pointless moments occurred earlier this month when Zimbabwe announced that 12 zeros will be “chopped off” the currency. If you weren’t sure which “illion” had 12 zeros after it, it’s a trillion. Zimbabwe has trillion dollar bank notes, [...]

Shakespeare warns us, “Neither a borrower nor a lender be”, which seems like good advice. Sadly, like a lot of other good advice, it suffers from difficulties during implementation. It seems we’ve borrowed – quite a bit.  Even those who haven’t personally borrowed or lent are still under the collective borrowing of our country. Worse [...]

By now, everyone has figured out just how bad things are – or have they? Since we can’t know how bad things will get, it’s difficult to judge how bad things are right now, and at what point along the road we are, and where the road leads. Obama seems to have it all figured [...]

“Send me your gold in an envelope, and I will send you a check back for some unspecified amount of money.” A keen citizen might be wary of such a transaction, but you might be surprised what a mildly entertaining superbowl ad can get you. Cash4Gold has been at this for awhile. Although they claim [...]

Today is Groundhog Day – that wonderful day when we use the supposed actions of a rodent to predict winter’s duration. Not, perhaps, an especially scientific pursuit, but then neither is economic forecasting and that never stopped anyone. What we’re really curious about, of course, is the extent of our economic winter. Unfortunately, we have [...]