gold, page-9398

Thanks for that Andy,

The biggest disaster for the American economy was not that it suffered a sub prime mortgage crisis but rather that one of their best economists (in my opinion) died only years earlier and thus could not commentate:

Milton Friedman Quotes

We have a system that increasingly taxes work and subsidizes nonwork.

Nothing is so permanent as a temporary government program.

Many people want the government to protect the consumer. A much more urgent problem is to protect the consumer from the government.

Only government can take perfectly good paper, cover it with perfectly good ink and make the combination worthless.

and the kicker,

The Fed was largely responsible for converting what might have been a garden-variety recession, although perhaps a fairly severe one, into a major catastrophe. Instead of using its powers to offset the depression, it presided over a decline in the quantity of money by one-third from 1929 to 1933 ... Far from the depression being a failure of the free-enterprise system, it was a tragic failure of government.

Oh life has a tendency of coming full circle don't it!