Neither super, nor a committee. But it's our un-super non-committee. A few facts about this unholy union: * There will be 12 members. Mostly picked for political reasons (read: not for their ability to actually fix what ails us). * The 12 members have until November...

The shot across the bow in the Great American Decline came at the usual time: just before the weekend after the market closed on a Friday. This time-honored tradition of announcing horrid things just as one tucks into Friday night was invented by flaks who believed --...

The good news: in a deal yet-to-be-passed by either house, Obama and Boehner's Raucous Caucus have finally agreed to raise the debt ceiling by $2.4 trillion in two stages, in exchange for an equal amount of spending cuts -- with $917 billion of the cuts to span the...

Lifeboats for senators and bankers only. Fidelity, which never sends emails, except to market its herd-investing strategies, has suddenly sputtered to life. This weekend's missive: "Debt ceiling: what you should know." Really. It's a little late to be sending this...

The thing about playing chicken is that fatally high stakes are a prerequisite of the game. And someone -- not excluding, say, an entire country -- is going lose. If you believe market pundits like Jim Rogers (an American trader of some fame who chooses to teach his...

"Concentrated power has always been the enemy of liberty."   -- Ronald Reagan Wall Street blames Washington for all the financial crises. And Washington blames Wall Street back. It would be amusing, if it wasn't so pathetic. Now we know the truth -- that both are...

Somewhere in the United States, right now, a billionaire is paying his taxes. This makes some people -- not naming any names -- very unhappy. In our nation, it is imperative that hedge fund managers, for example, pay roughly 15% on earnings via a handy loophole,...

I was cleansing my inbox today and found this friendly letter to the Fed from 2007 written by our comrades at Long or Short Capital (vaguely connected to our own fake hedge fund, Intergalactic Capital). I was all ready to take a whimsical walk down memory...

My New England home was my favorite place in the world when I was little. We bought it with several acres of land and it was surrounded by fields and forests and freshwater ponds on all sides. Our property was flanked by the longest line of ancient green-and-blue fir...

A reader requested I write about the inevitable zombie apocalypse. Very well then. I do not ascribe zombies to the rise of the Tea Party, the Gang of Six, or today's call by euro-zone chiefs for a "selective default" on the Greek debt. Although that would be...

'I was being sued...it upset me.'A midlife crisis can take many forms. Cheating on your spouse. Purchasing a Maserati. Wearing Billabong. Buying into The Lynx Effect. Just being a jerk. But putting up an "execution" list on your Web site of high-ranking financial and...

. So there's this small issue of the world being debt-ridden and nobody hiring and the delicate financial machinery of our country breaking down in a way that can only be called utterly embarrassing. This is not altogether bad news. For those who have long been...