When Ben Bernanke gave his speech to the London School of Economics, our reporter was on the scene. Terry Easton put a tough question to America's central banker: aren't your interventions just making the situation worse, he wanted to know. Amid the blah...blah...blah...of Bernanke's response was this: "The tendency of financial systems ...read more

Wow, there were cops everywhere. On Wednesday, the day before the G-20 opened, I drove through the Oakland section of town, home to the University of Pittsburgh and Carnegie Mellon University. There were squads of state troopers on every block. It was just a long, gray line of troopers, with their ...read more

In my father's house are many mansions. Surely one of them has a room with no elephants in it.... Not to crunch too many metaphors right here at the top, but a consensus seems to be firming up in the animate jello of the Internet that we have entered the Season ...read more

In our history, the American nation committed obvious sins against select groups of people, and we've paid bitterly for some of that. But now it's our sins against the land itself that threaten to sink the USA as a viable enterprise. It's odd, that in his otherwise excellent blow-by-blow account ("Eight ...read more

Looks like Boy Blunder Two is going to do it again, breaking campaign promises, endangering the economy by pandering to outraged union members, annoying the USA's biggest creditor, and imposing yet another enormous tax on the American people who drive cars. This time the Messiah proposes to increase the tariff ...read more

The FDIC is considering tapping its emergency line of credit with the Treasury. FDIC Chair Sheila Bair recently hinted after a speech at Georgetown University that all options are on the table when it comes time to replenish the dwindling Deposit Insurance Fund. We’ll find out more in the next ...read more

Now that everybody in the USA, from the janitors in their man-caves to the president addressing congress, has declared the "recession" over, is exactly the moment when what's left of the so-called economy is most likely to implode. If there were still shoeshine boys on Wall Street, they'd be starting ...read more

In my larval, pre-blogging days, I always faced the back-to-school moment with abject dread.  It meant returning to a program of the most severe, mind-numbing regimentation in the ghastly New York City public schools after a summer of idyllic unreality in the New Hampshire woods, where I went to a ...read more

The phrase, “surviving a game show” just became more serious. According to USA Today — I know, not the most hard-hitting rag out there — contestants on shows like America’s Got Talent and Deal or No Deal have undergone a dramatic change in the past year. Instead of dreaming of building a ...read more

Damned if he does; damned if he doesn't. Last week, Ben Bernanke got the nod for another stint as head of the world's most important central bank. Yes, he completely misunderstood the implications of the hugely negative US trade balance, believing that America did the world a favor by spending its ...read more