R3s: Ron Paul’s Honesty Is Courageous.

At [recent CNN] debate, Jim Cramer, in his sweaty, too-close-at-the-party way, asked Ron Paul the following question: I'm on the frontlines of the stock market. We were down 400 points today. We're not going to be done going down if this keeps going on, if Italy keeps -- the rates keep going up. Surely you must recognize that this is a moment-to-moment situation for people who have 401(k)s and IRAs on the line and you wouldn't just let it fail, just go away and take our banking system with it? Paul, totally unruffled by the "gotcha" question, answered directly from his convictions. No, you have to let it -- you have to let it liquidate. We've had -- we took 40 years to build up this worldwide debt. We're in a debt crisis never seen before in our history. The sovereign debt of this world is equal to the GDP, as ours is in this country. If you prop it up, you'll do exactly what we did in the depression, prolong the agony. If you do -- if you prop it up, you do what Japan has done for 20 years...

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Cities with the Most Home Foreclosures in America — way too many red dots!

Note: The red dots show homes currently in foreclosure. The slide title describes the fraction of homes that received foreclosure filings in 2010 Although some of the worst hit areas in Nevada , California and Florida improved from 2009, the foreclosure rate in these areas remains high.For a way to visualize the foreclosure crisis, they borrowed a maps technique described by Barry Ritholtz Ritholtz.com --google-map-foreclosures; Keep scrolling down, Las Vegas is the big winner/loser with its number of foreclosures.

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