"Governments Took Over the Exclusive Function of Coining Money Because Unscrupulous Men Began Coating Cheap Metal Disks With Gold and Silver Plating."

If you're still the kind of unpatriotic bastard who doesn't want to help America by going deeper into debt and then paying your way out with Monopoly money, well, this is all your fault: After a week of creeping yields, demand for 10-year Treasury notes soared again today, putting off expectations the 10-year note would soon be yielding above 4 percent. This dampens the Obama Administration's hopes for a return to sweet, sweet inflation, and could complicate the Federal Reserve's plan to stop buying U.S. Treasuries at the end of the summer. (Fed purchases of Treasuries are pro-inflationary; its sales of Treasuries are anti-inflationary, or at least that's what the New York Fed says in a comic book.)

The Federal Open Market Committee will convene tomorrow and Wednesday for a closed-door session of nude dancing and child sacrifice, during which it is expected to focus on treating the commercial real estate market that has been coughing up blood from coast to coast.

Since there is a zero-percent chance that anybody will consider the actual solution to the commercial and residential real estate disease—allow overleveraged jerks to go out of business and let prices fall to where saving souls will no longer be priced out of the market—we'll just have to cross our fingers and hope that Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke, Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner and the rest of the geniuses who failed to see the real estate bubble when it was popping will now have perfect timing, and engineer that recovery where you still won't be able to find a job.

Think they can't do it? Then watch this two–part mashup of material from the Rick Prelinger archive, and be enlightened. You're not wasting your money, you're serving your country: