What can I say except good job! I enjoyed Nouriel on Bill Maher. He looked like he was having a really good time with Bill.The crisis in the US is more than anyone is letting on because the crisis has not moved out of housing, then moved into local and state coffers but has now moved into pension funds. The stock market rally did help them but the pension funds have a lot in housing and CRE which are both still bleeding. Plus they bought a lot of the securitized debt obligation contracts and other toxic garbage in an attempt to realize unrealistic returns.The pension funds were in trouble before the current economic downturn started. They contributed to the excesses because of their underfunding and generous outlays. They were the main source of buyers of the toxic waste that Lehman and Goldman sold because of their need for extra ordinary returns.I hear lots of people say the US is either in recovery or at a minimum stabilized. I can go for the stabilized but I can’t believe there is any actual recovery and won’t be until we have undergone our debt deflation. Trillion of dollars of debt need to be written of or restructured at much lower levels.Why?Just because a lot of debt has been socialized and more created to fund more consumption, that isn’t fixing anything. All this has done is shift the problems from the TBTFs to the public. It was the private public that couldn’t make its payments and now it is the government that has to borrow even more than they already did to make its ends meet.The government was in the black before this started and now it is not only in the red but bleeding buckets. I don’t know what kind of organism you think the US is but there are no organisms or corporations I have ever heard of that can bleed blood or money without first being wounded, then being mortally ill, then finally dying.Before recovery can start, you have to triage the bleeding.When you look at a government or a corporation as an organism, the money required to keep it going is like food to any living organism. Even when bleeding, it has to have enough food, taxes or sales or something.. Borrowing is like any living being eating its internal stores and its seed for future income or growth. Eating the seed that it would plant in the spring to have food for the future is not a positive event or trend.In case no one has noticed, the government in the US, which includes local and state governments, is in going down hill fast. We are eating our seed at an alarming rate. The income in total has receded so fast that the limbs (state and local entities) are atrophying and dying. The main government is still beating but that can’t last long with the limbs and organs dying.. The insanity is that the federal government is so out of touch with its limbs that it doesn’t even realize that it is dying.There are increasing obligations going forward that income isn’t able to pay for. Police, fire, public health, environmental concerns like but not only the gulf oil spill, SS, Medicare, the new health bill, and on and on… At a time when the cost of additional debt reduces the available cash and the economy is producing much less in taxable earnings, wages and incomes.So we, the US in total, are in the critical care unit. The IV’s feeding us is our seed for future growth. AND, just like what is happening in Greece, the US will eventually run out of options.To bad the leadership is in such denial or hijacked by those who haven’t a clue and are personally greedy and care little for the Republic.

The video is working in the U.S., but I have heard that it is not working in the UK.

I meant to say that the government was in the red and is now bleeding even worse. Not that it has ever been in the black in my lifetime.