Upon cruising the Federal Reserve website, I ran into some information that I found intriguing. It was the numbers for the total U.S. mortgage debt outstanding, dating back to 2005. Take a look and see if you can spot the same disturbing story within the numbers.

According to Politico, the U.S. government’s own watchdog has concluded that the massive number of bailouts, capital injections, stimulus packages, etc. could cost as much as $23 trillion dollars! I don’t even know what to say. That’s close to twice our annual GDP. That’s over $70,000 for every man, woman and child in the country! Somehow, no amount of sarcasm can make this feel OK. With the only possible success of the federal stimuli being the economy is getting worse at a slower rate (which may have little to nothing to do with the stimulus), Obama has targeted a new type of stimulus: worker productivity. The esteemed Onion News Network reports.

Case-Shiller home price indices study constant-quality real estate values. The indices are named after economists Karl Case, Robert Shiller and Allan Weiss, who began tinkering with methods to normalize housing prices in the 1980s. By normalizing, I mean to communicate the amount of appreciation or depreciation in a given real estate market, from a baseline date. The nice thing about Case-Shiller indices is they measure and compare repeat sales of the same property, over time. This gives a clearer picture of what price the market values a given home at, as opposed to doing a comparative market analysis of “like properties” in the area.

You can see my take on the housing/financial crisis in Part 1 and Part 2 of my series on the subject. In this video, renowned economist, Thomas Sowell gives a brief explanation of who caused the housing bubble. A longer version can be found here and you can check out his new book on the subject; The Housing Boom and Bust.

Ever wonder why it costs an arm and a leg to go to college these days? Peter Schiff explains:

Last time, I talked about one of the titans of modern economics, Anna Schwartz, who was highly critical of both the Bush and Obama administrations in their handling of monetary policy.  Recently, I caught a comprehensive interview with another such person, Paul Samuelson, of the famous Stolper-Samuelson theorem, which governs a great deal of the [...]

Not so fast there slick. Up and down swings are extremely common, recession or not. Bear market rallies were actually quite common in the Great Depression.

As the United States looks to revamp the health care system, some say it is a complete failure, while others contend, while flawed, it is the best system in the world.

A vicious cycle is going on. The government engages in deficit spending, racking up a debt which makes any investor wonder if the U.S. is good for the money. Investors who loan money, require a risk premium to compensate for their risk exposure. As the risk to loan money to the U.S. increases from a ballooning debt, the required rates of return for the Treasury debt must increase. So, the U.S. government must pay higher yields to China and other creditors to finance deficit spending.

Basically, monetizing debt is a process of lending money to one’s self. The government spends, proceeds to write an IOU (debt contract in the form of a T-bill) and hands it to the Federal Reserve.