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.

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

We don’t have to go back very far to see the classic boom, bubble, and bust play out. In just the last 15 years, we’ve been fortunate enough to watch over-zealous traders lose their heads again and again. First, they bought tech companies for 80 times their earnings in the late ’90s and then happily purchased banks and insurance companies that were leveraged at 35 times their equity. This time, however, we don’t even need the boom or the bubble to see a bust.

I hope the federal government is paying attention. As regulations and costs increase, more companies, like Gander Mountain (NASDAQ:GMTN) are going private. It is not good news for the nation’s vital financial sector.

“The real danger — economically, socially or politically speaking — in the 1930s was loads of young men without jobs.”

Personal conversions sometimes mark dramatic turns in history. Saul of Taursus saw a vision so bright it left him blind. The next thing you know, he had changed his name and was pushing Christianity all over the world. According to Gibbon, the Roman Empire fell as a consequence. Then, on the advice of his mistress, Gabrielle, Henry IV became a Catholic, leading to the Edict of Nantes and its subsequent revocation.

Is the government creating another subprime-mortgage bubble?

It was more than a year ago – Sept. 14, 2008 – that Lehman Bros. Holding Co. (OTC: LEHMQ) finally collapsed under the weight of its own bad investments.

It was one year ago that Lehman Bros. went to the great investment bank in the sky. But it was also when the feds arranged the shotgun marriage of a failing Merrill Lynch to a moribund Bank of America (NYSE:BAC). And AIG’s collapse into federal hands was taking shape, if not yet a done deal.