The Prez finally gets the word...

In a sobering holiday interview with C-SPAN, President Obama boldly told Americans: "We are out of money."

Full report.

Living standards will never be the same.

You can temporarily hide problems in your biggest banks by tinkering with accountancy laws and regulations, and by pumping trillions into them. GM, on the other hand, is about to blow up in the middle of Main Street, where everyone can see it. Davidowitz sums it up in a few words that tell the whole story that everyone is so eager to avoid owning up to: "Living standards will never be the same"

Read.

S&P 500 earnings plunge

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Proven long ago: Earthmonkey is stunningly easy to, distract, amaze and confound

One of the first tricks in Penn and Teller's Las Vegas show begins when Teller—the short, quiet one—strolls onstage with a lit cigarette, inhales, drops it to the floor, and stamps it out. Then he takes another cigarette from his suit pocket and lights it.

No magic there, right? But then Teller pivots so the audience can see him from the other side. He goes through the same set of motions, except this time everything is different: Much of what just transpired, the audience now perceives, was a charade, a carefully orchestrated stack of lies. He doesn't stamp out the first cigarette—he palms it, then puts it in his ear. There is no second cigarette; it's a pencil stub. The smoke from the first butt is real, but the lighter used on the pencil is actually a flashlight. Yet the illusion is executed so perfectly that every step looks real, even when you're shown that it is not.

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The Collapse

"There is no means of avoiding the final collapse of a boom brought about by credit expansion."[My emphasis] --Ludwig von Mises, Human Action (pg 572)