Chinese officials have once again publicly stated their intention to buy less U.S. Treasury debt, according to the December 18 Shanghai Daily newspaper. "The U.S. current account deficit is falling as residents' savings increase, so its trade turnover is falling, which means the US is supplying fewer dollars to the rest of the world," Zhu Min, deputy governor of the People's Bank of China, said. "The world does not have so much money to buy more U.S. Treasuries."

Federal Reserve Open Market Committee Chairman Ben Bernanke is pulling out all the stops to kill Congressman Ron Paul's legislation to audit the Federal Reserve Bank, this time with a November 29 op-ed column in the Sunday Washington Post.

News that  another 263,000 jobs were lost in September has led a number of uninformed analysts to wonder whether the recession will continue.

Ron Paul is clearly on a political roll. He's got his new book End the Fed running toward the top of the bestseller lists (#6 on both the Amazon and the New York Times bestseller lists), and last night he promoted the book on Comedy Central's Daily Show with Jon Stewart.

Just call it irony. The same day the value of the dollar plunged to a current-year low as measured against six other major currencies, and the same week in which the U.S. Treasury is in the midst of a record $106 billion debt auction, Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke fielded a question on PBS’s “News Hour” from a man who touched on the problem:

Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke must know he’s in trouble. This week he completed a “town hall”-style meeting for PBS television to promote the Federal Reserve and suppress what appears to be overwhelming congressional support for an independent audit of the Fed.

Congressional Budget Office Director Douglas W. Elmendorf gave a fiscal wake-up call to Senate Budget Committee members in testimony on July 16, noting that “the federal budget is on an unsustainable path — meaning that federal debt will continue to grow much faster than the economy over the long run.”

Asked by This Week’s George Stephanopoulos about the Obama Administration’s terrible economic prognostications in advance of passage of the $787 billion “stimulus” spending bill back in February, Vice President Joe Biden regurgitated a familiar talking point:

The Ludwig von Mises Institute’s Jeffrey Tucker recently published a column entitled "Free Bernie Madoff," in which he makes the case for freeing the $67 billion swindler.

The question sounds like a joke, made up by one of the talented writers for Comedy Central’s Daily Show itself: Is the Daily Show’s Jon Stewart the journalistic reincarnation of Edward R. Murrow? But this was the serious question posed by New York Times writers Bill Carter and Brian Stelter on December 27, after Stewart rallied the media toward granting federal healthcare funding for September 11 first responders.