You wake up in the middle of the night for no apparent reason.  There are simply too many things going through your mind to be able to sleep through the quiet hours of the night.  A trip to the kitchen and a few moments staring out the window at a dark and peaceful world aren’t quite enough.  The stillness envelopes you and your world as a threat, not a moment of peace warm in bed.

Nothing really changes at that time of night – it’s always up to the next morning to make something happen.  Welcome to a new kind of Morning in America, the day after a sleepless night.

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You can’t have your cake and eat it, too.  It’s a silly old saying with a huge dollop of folk wisdom hidden in the middle of it.  But money spent is sometimes more than just money gone – in an integrated world it’s a choice to make one connection when another one might have been a better choice.

Rather than just measure how much money is going in and out, it might be better to understand what we could buy with the same money.  The technical term for this is “Opportunity Cost”, or what we give up by making the choices we do.

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The economy, as a great big thing, is mysterious.  The lives of millions of people connect into one big system that has its own ways apart from any one of them.  But there are people who have positions of power and influence, those whose job it is to keep it all keepin’ on.

Chief among them is the Chief, Ben Bernanke.  Who is this guy?

More people every day are asking that question.  The press, for its part, gave his introduction a long time ago – and rarely go back over the same ground.  That’s a shame because now we have a track record to examine.

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