A veritable incubator of short cuts, schemes and devices to overcome the truth.

If the stock market does go through a crisis of confidence, which I think clearly will happen one of these days, no one can predict just like you couldn't the dot com crash or the Lehman crash, but when it goes down it will go down by thousands of points because everyone will panic. No one owns this market today because they believe there's a huge sunny future for the United States economy. They're buying because they think the Fed can keep the thing pumped up, the bubble expanding.

I think everybody in this generation, and I'm the leading edge of the baby boom - I was born in 1946 - has benefitted from a 30-year explosion of debt, which created temporary but unsustainable economic prosperity and a financialization of the system through lower, and lower, and lower interest rates that has created massive rewards to speculation but not real investments so I benefitted from it. Almost everyone who has been in the market has benefitted but they didn't earn it.

I'm just not going to spend a lot of political capital solving some other guy's problem in 2010.

I invest in anything that Bernanke can't destroy, including gold, canned beans, bottled water and flashlight batteries.

I think everybody benefitted from what I am calling a bubble finance system, a bubble economy and if we're ever going to right the system, we're going to have to stop this explosion of the federal debt. We need huge spending cuts, OK? Don't get me wrong, we need to raise regular taxes too but even beyond that it's not going to hurt if we want to reset the system to ask those who have benefitted disproportionately - remember, we got $60 trillion of net worth in the household sector. $45 trillion of that belongs to the top 5 percent.

Then, when the Fed's fire hoses started spraying an elephant soup of liquidity injections in every direction, and its balance sheet grew by $1.3 trillion in just thirteen weeks compared to $850 billion during its first ninety-four years, I became convinced that the Fed was flying by the seat of its pants, making it up as it went along. It was evident that its aim was to stop the hissy fit on Wall Streetm and that the thread of a Great Depression 2.0 was just a cover story for a panicked spree of money printing that exceeded any other episode in recorded human history.