Billionaire investor George Soros didn't mince words yesterday.

"This is a period of wealth destruction. The people who make money will be few and far between. There will be a lot more money lost than made.
"I think this is probably more serious than anything in our lifetime," he says. In short, his feeling is that the United States and Britain are facing a recession of a scale greater than the early-1990s, greater even than the 1970s.

If it was someone other than Soros that was saying this (someone like me, for instance), you could probably ignore these sorts of warnings. There is always someone who will yell, "The End Is Near!"

The official deficit for 2007 was $248.2 billion. However, our national debt increased by $501 Billion in 2007.
Meanwhile debt obligations for America increased by $2.5 Trillion last year.

So what's the real number? They are all real numbers. The differences between them is what you are looking at.
For instance, the deficit number accounts for how much money the government spent versus how much it took in, but not counting things like the Wars in Iraq and Afghansitan, or borrowing from Social Security. (OK, maybe this isn't a real number then.)

The national debt numbers account for all that, but doesn't account for promises of future payments.

"Every action has an equal and opposite reaction."
- Sir Isaac Newton's Third Law

Two people were shot to death by police in Mogadishu when starving Somalians rioted over rising food prices. Starving Haitians are eating "mud biscuits" because they can no longer afford to eat real food. The United Nations Food Agency sees civil war breaking out in "sub-Saharan, African and also in Asia and Latin America" because of the rising price of food, fuel, and basic commodities.

"This economy is going to come on. I'm confident it will."
- President Bush

More than 3/4 of Americans think we are in a recession. Fortunately the Bush Administration has been able to prove the vast majority of Americans wrong this week, because all the numbers it released say that the economy is still growing.

Well, it is still growing as long as you don't look at the numbers too closely.

The headline number yesterday was Strong Consumer Spending. It was twice as high as market estimates.

It's the silly season again, and that means that politicians will say one thing while doing another and then pretend they are being consistent. For instance, President Bush made a big deal of opposing the Democratic-sponsored bill for using the F.H.A. to bailout distressed homeowners. John McCain also opposes a bailout for homeowners.

And yet, just a couple weeks ago, the Bush Administration proposed using the F.H.A. to bailout homeowners.

While the two plans are different, they both involve using the same agency to do the same thing.