If the Karmabanque hasn't worked, it's because there isn't yet a critical mass of people who are prepared to fight back and who instead prefer to be victims.

World's major powers, including China and Russia, don't want to 'finance' American military adventures anymore.

What I immediately recognized about Wall Street in 1983 was that it was a continuation of my career in theater. Wall Street is a big theater, and it's all illusions.

Russia's economy is both cursed and blessed by oil. When the oil price goes up, there is a tremendous 'wealth effect' spilling over into all corners of the economy, but this diminishes the drive to develop other industries to diversify away from overreliance on oil.

The Keynesian prescription for unemployment rests on the persistence of a 'money illusion' among workers, i.e., on the belief that while, through unions and government, they will keep money wage rates from falling, they will also accept a fall in real wage rates via higher prices.

The money the president wants to borrow for Iraq will come directly out of the American taxpayer wallets in the form of Medicare and Social Security receipts. That's your money.

Viewed from a distance, or through the eye of the All-Knowing CEO of the Universe, the crash of 2008 followed the usual pattern. A long-lived boom driven by cheap credit, going back as far as 1982 (though subject to interruptions in the mid-1980s and 1990s, and in 2001), came to grief because of a rise in the cost of borrowing money.

Money does not make you happy but it quiets the nerves.