Apparently, the Federal Reserve commissioned a study on the condition of the United States Government. That study was finished and released a few weeks ago and concluded that the United States is bankrupt and that the remedies for saving it are so drastic that it just won't happen....triple taxes cut spending so dramatically that most programs would have to shut down.

The problem is debt. I've been tracking the debt issue in my monthly update Tharp's thoughts. I concluded that the total debt was between 35-40 trillion dollars and couldn't see how we were going to get out of that. However, the economic professors who did the study concluded that our debt was much worse... More like $67 trillion. They basically said that only a country that had the reserve currency of the world could get itself in that deep of a hole and that suddenly (but who knows when) we'll find that other nations will stop accepting the dollar as the world's reserve currency and then we'll really start to feel the consequences of the problem.

I don't know how this one will play out and I haven't seen the studies yet... So stay tuned. Incidentally, this information came out right about the time that Israel rolled into Lebanon, so the media was distracted from something that probably would have been major news. Hmmm!!!

By the way, last week was the best week for the stock market all year. Perhaps my friend was right about the market being poised to turn around. However, if that's the case, then it's a purely short term phenomenon, but that's just my opinion based upon the long term perspective of the market.