There are no checks and balances if the gov is wrong. If a private entrepreneur makes a mistake, he goes bankrupt, the losses are cut; if he bets wrong, he loses; if the gov bets wrong, they just get bigger, they just appropriate more money. It's a bottomless pit, because they either get it from the tax payers or run it off a printing press.

Confidence by itself, unless it has a valid basis, can get us into trouble.

Fifty-dollar oil is just another stop on the road to much higher crude prices.

The real bubble in China is in US Treasuries, in US dollars.

Printing money is merely taxation in another form.

Perhaps the most important reason to be skeptical of government inflation numbers is that the government, like a fox campaigning to guard a hen house, has many reasons to be disingenuous. As the world's largest debtor, the Federal Government is inflation's primary beneficiary.

What got us out of the depression was capitalism, and we would have gotten out a lot quicker had the government not intervened.