Right now, however the Fed is on record that they will start monetizing debt and already basically doubled the monetary base. Velocity is still low and many banks aren’t lending, but still, with that kind of monetary expansion, there’s no reason to expect gold prices won’t continue to rise… be it to $1500 or beyond.

Late in the fall of 1988 the accounting firm, Coopers & Lybrand (C&L), won a competitive award to construct a computer system that collected the monthly security and loan information relating to Ginnie Mae’s mortgage-backed security program. As a C&L consultant with a math major and a Wharton M.B.A., I was put in charge of testing the system as it was being developed.

Where is Howard Beale when we need him?  Two years into the Greatest Recession Since the Great Depression (GRSGD) and our financial leaders are still telling us that we need to be patient while waiting for our economic recovery.

Mortgage debt in the United States (currently more than $10 trillion) has grown to the point that it is nearly the same size as our national debt (in fact, a few years ago, U.S. mortgage debt actually successfully passed our national debt), and it has only been as a result of the new Administration’s debt spending that our national debt has regained the lead in the race to see which can account for the highest amount of our economic debt.

Peter Schiff just lost the Republican nod for US Senator in Connecticut. If someone ever embodied the antithesis to the nation’s current approach, it is Schiff.

A few days ago a friend of mine asked me what I would say in an open letter to a group of Independents if they asked me what I thought of the financial reform bill that is currently being considered in Washington. The following is my open letter response to those Independents:

Here Dean Baker discusses why the housing market recovery is nowhere near sustainable:

After Ron Paul, every Republican in the House and a large number of Democrats pushed through H.R. 1207 (against the efforts of the Federal Reserve and their former Enron lobbyist), Bernie Sanders went soft. It appears he has comprised the teeth out of S. 604 and put the effort to audit the Fed in jeopardy.

As bad as all that sounds, it ignores the dire situation we are facing in a very familiar setting; the housing market. Contrary to popular wisdom, the ‘toxic assets’ have not been cleaned out. It is very likely we are heading for a second mortgage meltdown.

What is a bit surprising is how many IRS agents are going to be hired to enforce the new codes: 16,500! Now this is based on a release by Republican congressmen Kevin Brady, so that does make me skeptical. But the release bases the 16,500 number on an analysis by the Joint Economic Committee and the House Ways & Means Committee minority staff. So we’ll have to wait and see. But if Brady is anywhere close to accurate, it would seem to cast doubt on the idea that Obamacare will reduce the tax burden and amount of red tape.