For all the talk we do around here about our unsustainable Empire of Debt, certain events are still startling. Not surprising, but startling.

Don’t look now, but China has just displaced Japan as the leading holder of U.S. Treasury debt.

Well now, anyone who took my advice on Friday should have had a pleasant weekend, unconcerned about what the G20 leaders would do, which as I figured was just about nothing.  They pledged to rig up more regulations that would preserve the place of the money-shuffling class in the world’s power structure, and made a few noises about the United States having somewhat less influence in that power structure going forward.  Neither of which was much of a surprise.

I just can’t make up my mind:  Is Hank Paulson committing premeditated murder of the U.S. economy, or merely negligent homicide?

DR readers might have been alarmed to read Dan Amoss‘ warning in yesterday’s edition that, “Some in Congress are floating a proposal to steal your 401(k), sell the proceeds, and invest in ‘government-guaranteed’ retirement accounts.”  Alarming especially to folks reading about it for the first time.  So let’s go into a little more depth.

It’s almost too much to digest at once, the new revelations over how various aspects of the sundry bailouts came about.  The information is too much, the outrage is too much.  But let’s try.

If the new president looked a little, well, burdened on election night, chances are he’s aging a couple of years in the six-hour span between the release of unemployment figures this morning and his first news conference as president-elect this afternoon.

One of the follies of the Bush administration was the notion that the class of money-shufflers who got us into the credit crunch could somehow be trusted to get us out of it.  Which is what makes the Obama administration such a breath of fresh — oh, wait, never mind.

The era of big government is back. Yes, I know, contra Bill Clinton in 1996, it never left us.  But I’m talking culturally, in the public mind, the zeitgeist.  Gone are the days when large numbers of people believed Ronald Reagan’s rhetoric (if only on the rhetorical level) that government is the problem and not the solution.

We pause now, in what has lately been a laundry list of fiscal and monetary folly, to bring you alarming news about energy.