States faced with three brutal options in 2010: inflation, high taxation or default
. – The West is being scuttled by leaders unable to face the reality of a post-crisis world, who keep resorting to methods from yesterday’s world despite their proved inefficiency.

US Wants China to Buy into Its Small Banks – Quan Qiu Jing Ji Shuai Tui, Chinese and U.S. regulators are negotiating a pact aimed at encouraging Chinese financial institutions to buy into small and medium-sized banks in the United States.

Get Prepared History is About To Repeat Itself – It’s coming in 2012: Another, bigger meltdown of Wall Street’s “too-greedy-to-fail” banks. No, this is not another fanatical warning about that Dec. 21, 2012 end-of-days prediction based on the Mayan calendar, though you may well ask “Who will survive?”

Arrogant and incapable of learning – Frederic Mishkin, a former member of the Fed’s board of governors, wrote an article in last Tuesday’s Financial Times that displayed that he, and presumably other Fed heads, have learned exactly nothing from the disastrous consequences of their activities in printing money over the past couple of decades.

Oil above $79 after US crude supply drop – Oil prices extended gains above $79 a barrel Wednesday in Asia after an unexpected drop in U.S. crude supplies suggested demand could be improving.

10 States Face Imminent Bankruptcy – California, Arizona, Rhode Island, Michigan, Oregon, Nevada, Florida, New Jersey, Illinois and Wisconsin. “California with 12 percent of the nation’s population had a disproportionate 32 percent of the nation’s welfare recipients, up from 22 percent only six years earlier.”