When you listen to tax-cut rhetoric, remember that giving one class of taxpayer a break requires - now or down the line - that an equivalent burden be imposed on other parties. In other words, if I get a break, someone else pays. Government can't deliver a free lunch to the country as a whole. It can however, determine who pays for lunch.

Stocks are the only thing that people are happy to buy when the price goes up.

I don't like what's going on with the executive compensation.

Investors, of course, can, by their own behavior make stock ownership highly risky. And many do. Active trading, attempts to "time" market movements, inadequate diversification, the payment of high and unnecessary fees to managers and advisors, and the use of borrowed money can destroy the decent returns that a life-long owner of equities would otherwise enjoy. Indeed, borrowed money has no place in the investor's tool kit.

Today people who hold cash equivalents feel comfortable. They shouldn't. They have opted for a terrible long-term asset, one that pays virtually nothing and is certain to depreciate in value.

Interest rates are to asset prices what gravity is to the apple. When there are low interest rates, there is a very low gravitational pull on asset prices.

I think it's been, you know, kind of like a tragic play to this point. But at this point, I think it's clear, and will be clear to the majority of the Congress. I think it's clear to the American people that there is only one countervailing force to a world where financial institutions are trying to sell instruments every day and where credit has dried up, and that's the United States Treasury.