Martin Hutchinson, contributing Editor to Money Morning and retired investment banker, shares his analysis of the current Federal Reserve Bureaucracy.

Adam Lass, Senior Editor of WaveStrength Options Weekly, turns his eye on the current economic ‘growth’ reports – including what may actually be growing in the U.S. economy.

Resident GoldBug at The Daily Reckoning, UK Edition, Bill Bonner offers his analysis of gold, the stock market and the end of the depression.

What’s the best way to get through a debt crisis? Straight through was our advice last week. For at least a thousand years, the business cycle went round and round without help from central bankers or economists. It is only since these geniuses have been on the case that really serious problems have arisen.

With the unemployment rate soaring alongside the U.S. budget deficit, the Obama Administration and congressional Democrats are struggling to solve the nation’s problems before next year’s midterm election.

“Gold continues to climb…stoked by inflation worries,” says a headline in the International Herald Tribune.

Just one bit of meaningful economic data so far this week: The American service sector grew in September for the first time in a year. The Institute for Supply Management’s nonmanufacturing index scored 50.9 last month, just 9/10ths of a point above the growth/contraction tipping point. That certainly isn’t a booming service sector, but having contracted for the last 11 months… we’ll take it.

Yesterday was another exciting day on Wall Street. The Dow rose 131 points…and gold shot up $25 to a new record, $1043.

Naturally, at the focus of renewed market pessimism is a struggling financial: CIT Group. (NYSE:CIT) The company — a hundred-year-old staple of small/medium business lending — is no stranger to walking the credit tightrope. They narrowly averted fiscal meltdown late last year with $2.3 billion in TARP bucks… then again in July by goosing bondholders with a $3 billion a debt-to-equity deal. Back then we joked, “Look for this crisis to repeat in a couple weeks.” We were wrong… it took a couple months.

One of the most interesting news items I’ve found was on the cover of The Financial Times, where I learned that a guy named Lahde “made tens of millions of dollars from betting against the financial and property sectors during [the] past two years”, and he now wanted to thank “the low hanging fruit, i.e. idiots whose parents paid for prep school, Yale, and then the Harvard MBA” who made it all possible for him to find enough suckers.