The latest auction of TIPS -- US Treasury debt with inflation protection -- produced a curiosity. Investors were willing to pay $105 for every $100 worth of inflation-protected notes.

At least someone is making money from this foreclosure racket.

This weekend, US Treasury Secretary Geithner proposed to the world's finance ministers that they cap their current account surpluses at a fixed percentage of GDP.  How would that work?  Why do it at all?  What’s the point?

The economy is either growing slowly, or contracting.

Printing up extra money -- with no backing -- used to be the sort of thing only counterfeiters did. Now it is done by the central bankers and Treasury Secretaries themselves.

Ben Bernanke gave the Japanese some advice about 10 years ago. He said that if their economy was stuck in the doldrums it was their own damned fault.

Things are not getting better. The US government is so deep in the hole it may never be able to get out. It borrows a dollar for every dollar it receives in taxes. So, it's still digging the hole deeper.

It's not enough just to get back the 8.36 million jobs that were lost in the crisis. The US also needs to create about 15 million more jobs over the next 10 years in order to stay even with population growth and return to full employment. That’s about 23 million all together.

There's no doubt that printing money can create a boom. But it's a phony boom, not a real one. And when it blows up, which it inevitably does, people are worse off than they were before.

Central bankers are betting big again.