When people are running up more and more debt for housing, they call that "real wealth." It exposes what's wrong in the mainstream economics and why most of the economics that justifies austerity programs and economic shrinkage is in the textbooks is not scientific. Junk economics denies the role of debt and denies the fact that the economic system we have now is dysfunctional.

To the deficit commission, a depression is the solution to the problem, not a problem.

If you increase living standards, you make labor more productive. This is why Asia today is becoming more productive than the United States.

People are putting their money into treasuries because they worry that the risk of putting their money into the bond market, the stock market or even the money markets is very high.

Debtor countries may postpone the inevitable by borrowing from the IMF or U.S. Treasury to buy out bondholders. This saves the latter from taking a loss - leaving the debtor country with debts that are even harder to annul, because they are to foreign governments and international institutions.

Every government, from the Obama administration right through to Angela Merkel, the Eurozone and the IMF, promise to save the banks, not the economy.

What do the 5%, or the 1% actually use their money for? They lend it back to the economy at large, they load it down with debt. They make their money by lending to the bottom 95%, or the bottom 99%. When you give them more after-tax income, it enables them to buy even more control of government, even more control of election campaigns. They're not going to spend this money back into the goods-and-services economy.