I was surprised to learn on Wikipedia's In the News section, on the front page, that Washington Mutual has collapsed. Apparently the FDIC took over the bank earlier in the week when it had learned that customers had removed nearly $17 billion in assets in the previous week after WaMu's credit rating had been downgraded considerably ( Read more... )

Allot of people are wondering why crude oil is trading at $114 and continually climbing in price and why gas and fuel prices are rising as a result ( Read more... )

I recently read again, Thomas DiLorenzo's How Capitalism Saved America and Thomas E. Woods, Jr.'s The Politically Incorrect Guide to American History and have been reading John Locke's Second Treatise of Civil Government, and I bought and just received a copy of the "Anti-capitalistic Mentality" by Ludwig von Mises ( Read more... )

The Great ModerationBernanke talks up how great national central banks have become in "dealing with economic crises" over the last 10 to 15 years (from 2004 when he gave the speech) and how they've "reduced" the number of economic cycles during that period. Unfortunately there was the big tech boom of the late 1990s that crashed in late 2000 and ( Read more... )

So everybody is talking recession after the lastest round of government issued "economic indicator" numbers were released last week. And I wasn't surprised. And I should say, I've known about the recession since 2005 when the house market started to crumble across the country, particularly when one of the blogs I read had been warning its readers ( Read more... )