Is It Any Wonder?

Late workout session so just a few items.

Greece on a Relative Basis
The Housing Time Bomb offers some thoughts on the relative "badness" of various countries as it relates to debt:
The Greece Fiscal Crisis: Throwing Stones at Glass Houses?
Good piece and I would add that scale matters. The size of the US and Japan issues make Greece look like a nanoparticle in comparison. Greece could get healthy on like 1/10 of an AIG bailout!

Double Dipping
Home sales, unemployment, you name it and it is going back the wrong way. Add in Car Sales as well via Calculated Risk:
US Light Vehicle Sales
There is just no way to see this stuff coming is there??

Gold and Silver Respond to the Printing Press
The metals were higher today and there were probably plenty of reasons for that, my favorites for the long term:
Fannie's On Balance-Sheet Loans Surged 900 Percent on January 1
Accounting changes balloon FNM mortgage holdings on the books. Now we know why the "not needed" expansion to infinite support for the firm was put in place. Backed by the US dollar baby!

Maybe the main reason real money is becoming more in need are stories like this one:
Kenneth Rogoff's Sovereign Debt Warnings Are So Wrong, It's Like He's Living In A Different Time Period
Author Marshall Auerback pens a wordy missive that boils down to (my take):
A country can print all the money it wants and there is no such thing as a spending constraint, well at least until one happens, but we are not there yet.
Something to that effect.

Have a good night.