Should central bankers actively undertake to burst asset bubbles, or should they stand around and watch them run out of steam, then try to clean up the mess by cutting interest rates? This has been the subject of a recent round of debate between central bank economists and other interest macro thinkers:

Stupid in America: How We Are Cheating Our Kids:

I have so far not commented on one of the strangest developments in the world of statistics-how the Federal Reserve have decided that the M3 measure of money supply will be “discontinued” without saying why . Since they came with no explanation there have been lots of speculation as to why they did it.

So those scurvy bums at Wal-Mart are finally getting what is coming to them! The state of Maryland will force all companies with more then 10,000 employees to spend at least 8 percent of their payroll on health insurance. Lots of companies have that many employees, but only one falls under the 8 percent threshold, which is you know who.

Poor government. It tries to encourage hybrid cars with tax breaks and penalties. Then those cars are threatened by people using the government’s grants of artificial patent monopolies. Poor state.

Since those ardent constitutionalists and stalwarts of small government in the Bush administration took over their desks at the start of 2001, Leviathan has racked up an aggregate spending total of a whisker under $11 trillion - around 25% of cumulative, non-government GDP in the period.