If countries are to survive in an age of increasingly unstable oil sources, they must reduce their exposure to the black stuff, writes Peter Whelan in Business & Finance magazine.

Please read Peter's the article here: Surviving in Age of High Oil Prices and Inflation

Rep. Alan Grayson talks to the Federal Reserve Inspector General Elizabeth Coleman of the Federal Reserve, asking her questions regarding trillions of dollars that came from the Fed's expanded balance sheet and what the losses on its $2 trillion portfolio are.

The Inspector General does not have the answers Grayson is looking for.

Essay by Meghan Brown

“If the story of the past quarter of a century has a one-line plot summary, it is the rediscovery of market capitalism.” – Alan Greenspan, The Age of Turbulence, p.14 For the past thirty years, neo-liberal economic thinking has been the dominant orthodoxy governing policy and shaping development. Born from Adam Smith and his ideas of the ‘invisible hand’, this theory prevails in many well-connected and highly influ

MDC activist Sam Chakaipa returns to his village in rural Zimbabwe to find his friends and neighbours starving to death, reduced to panning gold powder from the rivers to exchange for food at an exorbitant rate.

The Guardian via Youtube:

The answer to this global credit debacle is transparency. There are enormous sums of investor money waiting in the sidelines. The reason they have not been invested yet is due to a lack of transparency within the balance sheets of those institutions that constitute the global financial landscape. Make no mistake; capital needs to be deployed in order to create a return. With such uncertainty surrounding the global capital markets it is entirely normal that investors would pull back until a sense of clarity itself develops.

There are interesting parallels between the Madoff Ponzi scheme and the US and many other social security schemes internationally.

As the huge bulging demographic that is the Baby Boomers retire, the smaller demographic of the next generation will have to fund their retirement. As the Baby Boomers retire and begin to withdraw their funds from Social Security system there will be huge redemptions from US and other stock markets as much of their retirement funds are invested in the stock markets.

It wouldn't be suprising if you had never heard of backwardation. Though many commodities markets are frequently in backwardation, especially for seasonal or perishable/soft commodities, it has only happened twice in history in precious metals.

Or is that Bailout to the power of Bailout?

The Washington Times's Lawrence Hunter wrote last week that U.S. President-elect Barack Obama has an opportunity to reset the economy and restore the U.S. dollar to its preeminence as the world's reserve currency by reestablishing the gold standard.