The US GAO (Government Accounting Office) has published its audit of the federal reserve:
Audit in PDF | Synopsis of Audit
The audit shows the Federal Reserve Bank issuing $16 TRILLION in debt to banks and corporations around the world. Who authorized this release of US capital? The Federal Reserve Bank chairmen, such as Ben Bernanke.
For the 340 Million happy citizens of the US, that $16 Trillion is about $46,376 for every citizen of the US. Remember back in the Bush Presidency where we all got a little check for $800, or $1200, or something like that as our "incentive" to go invigorate the economy? That little amount seems more like a slap in the face now. With $16T of cash, the US could have paid all of its debts and gotten China off of our back.
Instead we continue to print paper with little regard to the consequences because the people in charge of said currency are not governed. We, the people of the United States, should be in charge of where our money is lent. That means our congress, the elected officials that we all lament at times, should be overseeing these Federal Reserve Bank people. Yet, they are not?
Write to your congress-person and demand that congressional oversight be implemented on the Federal Reserve Bank. Then demand some form of justice. Ben Bernanke and his cronies should be indicted for fraud and larceny.
Don't forget the capstone of this failure - our President who wants to raise all of our taxes because we can't afford to bailout our own senior citizens and their failing Social Security accounts. Imagine a $16T infusion of capital into Social Security? I think the AARP political machine should get on that right away.
I had morning coffee with a well respected friend of mine recently. Aside from chatting about the usual wifery and family, we touched on the subject of clustered indices and SQL Server performance. A common misconception in the software industry is that a clustered index will make your database queries faster. In fact, most cases will demonstrate the polar opposite of this assumption. The reason for this misconception is a misunderstanding of how the clustered index works in any database server. A clustered index is a node clustering of records that share a common index value. When you decide on an index strategy for your data, you must consider the range of data to be indexed. Remember back to your data structures classes and what you were taught about hashtable optimizations. A hashtable, which is another way of saying a database index, is just a table of N values that organizes a set of M records in quickly accessible lists that are of order L, where L is significantly less than M. ...