The attractive bright youngish twenty somethings that check us out at our great local Victoria food store Pepper's http://www.peppers-foods.com/ are on the front line of the growing inter-generational inequity in Canada that is reflected in other high income countries as university debt rises and hip replacement times fall. Wait until they have children.

Is the US dollar on the verge of becoming the mother of all black swans?

Bubble level home prices that would have to fall by 40% to normalise to long term trends. Fund raised to bet on this outcome. But how to bet on a national housing collapse? Enter Goldman Sachs.

Take existing securities whose underlying asset is mortgages (mortgage backed securities).  Package them into a new security called Collateralised Debt Obligations (CDOs) that act as insurance against falling house prices and sell them to the fund. (So far so legal).

The United States passes game changing health care legislation. Yes they could.

The price of getting old, why Chris Hitchens is a bad guy, why Paul Krugman is dangerous, why passing health care reform in the United States will doom America, the problem with debt, and the science of Epigentics.

It took about a century but the United States has changed the face of the country.

Three people trying to make sense of the world, Michael Lewis, Peter Tasker, and David Brooks. I met Michael Lewis once in Tokyo in the early 1990s while he was researching the book that became Pacific Rift (1992). Sitting one night with a few other long time financial gaijin types on some restaurant tatami mat somewhere anxious to get home to my family, he struck me as the typical non-Japanese weighted down with platitudes about Japan. He was. I left early.