A weaker Euro helps German exports just as a weaker dollar helps U. S. exports. Germany is gaining far more from the weaker Euro than it is paying to bail-out Greece.

This study proves not just that western governments can make significant budget sacrifices, it shows that they will make such sacrifices -- because they must -- again and again.

Yesterday stands as a metaphor for the market as a whole in the last decade, when clever substitutes for smart and size trumps sense. When too big to fail means too big to even care, something has to give.

Bond ratings should be like getting your home inspected in California: the inspector (the rating agency) should be liable for his or her mistakes.

Hedging risk is great in theory but often hard to do well, as the Great Recession clearly shows.  Goldman Sachs, in fact, may have hedged itself all the way out of business.  Really.

Trust through transparency is a completely different creature based on the novel idea that people say what they mean, do what they say they will, and make things that work because you can see how they work inside. Those workings are transparent, get it?

Seventy percent correct, while it may sound good, actually isn't good at all, as Simonyi proved. Seventy percent is terrible. What's amazing is that Greenspan still doesn't seem to understand this today.

Cities come and cities go and Detroit is in the process of going, replaced perhaps by Dearborn, home of Ford Motor Company, which still makes money. Dearborn has more space than squalor, a good tax base, and an educated population. Dearborn is the anti-Detroit to its sister city.

Whatever Bernanke, Dodd, Geithner, and Obama finally do to reform the current U. S. financial system may matter less to our future prosperity than the painful lessons we’ve been learning as a people. It’s us, not them.

It was all about fooling the Saudis and the Chinese, then, and the American people. It is doubtful that M3 was killed to deliberately set the stage for the Great Recession. But that’s what happened.