Ben Bernanke – the “Sultan of Spin” himself – came out Wednesday and echoed the misguided hopes of CNBC’s Trillion Dollar Survey from January.  He optimistically believes that the crisis will be resolved before the end of 2009…that 2010 will be a year of recovery.

As the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression continues to worsen, decades of deregulation and the growing independence at the state level are being reversed as a deteriorating national economy forces the federal government to increasingly take on responsibilities that no other institution has the power or resources to handle.

“I have a funny feeling that we’re not in Kansas, anymore.” Like Dorothy’s sublime observation of the surreal in “The Wizard of Oz,” our taking stock of where we are in the vortex of this economic tornado leads us to the same scary observation.

There’s a small revolution going on…You see it on TV when the commercials come on. You see it on the front page of your local newspaper. You see it everywhere. New corporations are being formed because of this revolution. And money is flooding into this sector undeterred.

Just because an economist or a central banker says something, it doesn’t make it so.