A depression would wring the debt out of the economy.  It would get rid of weak businesses.  It would turn spendthrift households into savers.  That’s got to be worth something.

The correction is doing its work.  The feds tried to stop it with trillions in loans, guarantees, and stimulus spending.  They failed.

Governments can't make bad debt go away, so they can't prevent a correction and a de-leveraging.

There's a reason economics is called the dismal science, and weeks like this just give it further meaning. In economics, there is what you see and what you don't. This week we are going to examine the headline data we all see and then take a look for what most observers do not see.

The key reason so many people have such fatalistic attitude towards trading is because it is an inherently unstable business.

When the government borrows money to fund its bailouts and boondoggles, for example, it is taking losses away from the people who deserve them and sticking them on the taxpayer.

Lawrence G. McMillan reviews the options market in his weekly column for July 2.

The only two things going up?

When interest rates were falling from 15% to 3% it was hard to go broke. Almost no matter how much debt you had, you could refinance at lower rates. Which gave the rest of the world the wrong idea. It seemed like you could borrow forever.

Stabilize public debts by 2016? By then, the US and other major economies will have more government debt than GDP. It is bound to be too late for many of them.