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This video of George Bush's top 10 moments according to David Letterman is hilarious. Bush is nearly out of office. We'll miss moments like these.

In economic circles, there has been a lot of buzz about Quantitative Easing of late. Basically, the U.S. Federal Reserve has lowered interest rates to near zero percent and the fear is that these cuts will not have enough effect on the…

Marc Faber is a hard money, old school investor who thinks that the U.S. government is going to reflate in order to avoid depression and that means gold. But, for those of you who don't know economic history, the fact is that this has been…

Given the historic nature of the Lehman Brothers bankruptcy, it bears explaining how the credit default swaps market work and why it matters.

It sure seems like California is insolvent. Just today we heard that Arnold Schwarzenegger contacted Hank Paulson to let him know that the State is having liquidity problems (see pdf) and needs help. California ranks as the world's 9th…

Whenever I wade into a new topic like digital photography, gardening or what have you, I visit the local bookstore and get a "For Dummies" book to guide me. I figure that it's the best way to get up-to-speed quickly without…

Is the U.S. in recession or not? Well, the U.S. printed a 3.3% number for growth in the second quarter according to the data released last week. Since then, I have been asking myself why we shouldn't believe the U.S. is in an expansion…

Back in May, I showed you a chart of Total U.S. Debt which demonstrated that the United States was an increasingly indebted country. This chart was for all domestic debt minus financials and it topped out at about 225% of GDP. Below is…

Yesterday I pointed out that today's global banking crisis has some historical precedents worthy of comparison. In particular, I looked at the Japanese bailout schemes from their housing bubble to see if there was anything there to learn.…

One reason many pundits feel this particular downturn will be quite nasty is the level of debt consumers have versus their savings. Since July 1982, when the stock market bottomed, Americans have been dis-saving and leveraging up like…