In reality, if there was genuine confidence, there would be no need to hold a “vote of confidence”. Thus, these confidence-seeking charades are anything but confidence-building.

Bottom line, in the Fed’s eyes and in the view of most economists, inflation seems benign and contained because they look at the rate of change rather than the absolute index. The index itself is just a hair shy from the record high reached in Sept which is another way of saying the cost of living has never been greater. Price stability that is not and has a negative impact on an economy where wages and interest income are growing less than the rate of change in inflation.

Spend a moment contemplating the notion that an elite college is sort of a cross between a church and a country club.

Hard-core Democrats and Republicans both like the familiar arguments over taxes: it gets their blood pumping and their base motivated.

You can tell a story that the creation of the euro resulted in a bloated European financial sector, which then funded the U.S. housing bubble.

As he explains, and as we and others have pointed out, the plan is to have insolvent European banks load up on insolvent European sovereign debt. That is what I keep describing as two drunks trying to prop one another up and make it home.
Another metaphor that keeps coming to mind is the Monty Python pet shop routine. The politicians are like the store clerk, insisting that the parrot is alive. The market is like the customer, who thinks that the clerk is, er, mistaken.

In political terms we are probably witnessing the end of an empire, and when such an event occurs it can be swift. Forward-thinkers need to look beyond the EU as an institution, and in this respect an alternative and as yet unrecognised future for Germany is evolving. She faces stagnant markets in Europe, declining markets in the US, but booming markets for her products in China, South East Asia and other emerging economies. Even if the eurozone does not break up, her economic motivations will lie increasingly elsewhere and the weaker EU members will remain an unwelcome burden.

The Solyndra scandal demonstrates that often, the real beneficiaries of government interference, be it subsidization or regulation, are elected officials and their preferred interest groups. Additionally, unnecessary government involvement in marketplaces, like that for “green” energy, stifles competition and inhibits companies from producing novel, moneymaking ideas and instead encourages them to expend resources keeping their government supporters happy.

According to the poll, ”the 64% of Americans who say big government will be the biggest threat to the country is just one percentage point shy of the record high, while the 26% who say big business is down from the 32% recorded during the recession.”