Watch Bjork Perform 'Declare Independence'
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Bjork's music is complex, mysterious and full of unpredictable sonic textures. The brilliant performances on Voltaic make it clear that Bjork isn't just a visionary, but also an artist who inspires those around her to create equal parts music and magic, in an effort to bring her vision to life.

So whether you choose to get the version that contains this CD (along with the spectacular concert DVD), or the version with Volta remixes, or the one with other concert audio, or even the vinyl, it's a joy to see and hear what Bjork has been doing for the past few years — and to share her visionary work.

Exclusive First Listen: Bjork, 'Voltaic'

Hear The Entire Album: 'Dark Night Of The Soul'

I've listened to the record all the way through at least a dozen times, and can confirm that Dark Night of the Soul delivers in every way you'd hope for. It's beautiful but haunting, surreal and dark, but sometimes comical and affecting, with ear-popping, multilayered production work. It just gets more mesmerizing with every listen.

In addition to Danger Mouse and Sparklehorse, other artists appearing on Dark Night of the Soul include James Mercer of The Shins, The Flaming Lips, Gruff Rhys of Super Furry Animals, Jason Lytle of Grandaddy, Julian Casablancas of The Strokes, Frank Black of the Pixies, Iggy Pop, Nina Persson of The Cardigans, Suzanne Vega, Vic Chesnutt, David Lynch, and Scott Spillane of Neutral Milk Hotel and The Gerbils.

Main Website: http://www.dnots.com/

Exclusive First Listen: Danger Mouse And Sparklehorse Team Up With David Lynch

* Chuck Norris does not mark to market. The market marks to Chuck.

* Chuck Norris does not go bankrupt. Chuck Norris ruptures banks.

* Source of hedge fund survivorship bias?: Funds that pay Chuck Norris 2 and 20 survive; others don’t.

* Private equity: Chuck Norris does not believe in leverage. Chuck Norris believes in crowbars.

* Investment banking: No-one defers Chuck Norris’s compensation.

* Capital structure: No-one subordinates Chuck Norris. All his equity is preferred.

* If Chuck Norris devised the bank stress tests, not even the Treasury Department would survive.

Chuck Norris & Finances

Thanks to David Van Sickle, we'll soon be able to track (and hopefully eliminate) recurring asthma attack outbreaks. Sickle, a scholar in the Department of Population Health Sciences at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, is working with students in the biomedical engineering program to create an asthma inhaler with a built-in GPS receiver.

The project is still in its early stages, but David's goal is to eventually map out danger zones that could be life-threatening to those stricken with the lung disease. He already has it all mapped out: "rescue inhalers" will pinpoint the location of each asthmatic attack and cross-reference it with other devices, attempting to detect new locations and trends that previously flew under the radar undetected by asthma researchers. Sickle envisions a time when his technology can help researchers discover exactly why people suffer from asthma.

"It will allow us to better target public-health interventions to the places and times when people are really suffering," Sickle said.

Disease detective plans GPS-enabled asthma inhaler

William K. Black suspects that it was more than greed and incompetence that brought down the U.S. financial sector and plunged the economy in recession — it was fraud. And he would know. When it comes to financial shenanigans, William K. Black, the former senior regulator who cracked down on banks during the savings and loan crisis of the 1980s, has seen pretty much everything.

Now an Associate Professor of Economics and Law at the University of Missouri, William K. Black tells Bill Moyers on the JOURNAL that the tool at the very center of mortgage collapse, creating triple-A rated bonds out of "liars' loans" — loans issued without verifying income, assets or employment — was a fraud, and the banks knew it.
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Watch online...

William K. Black: CSI Bailout

Imagine this scenario: You've gone out of town for whatever reason, driving your Lamborghini Gallardo Spyder. (If we had a Gallardo, you'd bet that taking road trips would be high on the agenda). Anyway, you get to your hotel, surrender your supercar's keys to the valet, and go on with your business. When it's time to leave, they go to retrieve your car and ... it's gone. That nightmare is just what happened to Eric Vargosko when he took his droptop lambo to Atlanta's Intercontinental Hotel. The swank hotel in the upscale Buckhead neighborhood was the last place Vargosko saw his car until it turned up a month later, damaged.

Just as disturbingly, the hotel has refused to talk to Vargosko, and the media isn't having any better luck with them or the Atlanta police. With WWSB TV's consumer reporter on the case, a police report was unearthed which stated that a hotel security camera recorded a valet handing the Lamborghini's keys to two men in the wee hours of the morning. Whether the two men, part of a larger group of seven that had been recorded by the camera while exiting an SUV at 3:30 AM, were thieves or acquaintances of the valet is unknown. Denied satisfaction on the issue thus far, Vargosko's hired an attorney, and will be avoiding the Intercontinental during future travels.

PSA: Be careful who you give your Lamborghini Gallardo Spyder keys to

Great article from Jim Jubak from MSN Money comments on US inflation and Chinese Yuan.:
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It's too soon to bury the U.S. dollar as the global reserve currency, but it is time to start thinking about writing its obituary.
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In the long run, however, make no mistake: The dollar's days as the world's reserve currency are numbered. And we have no one to blame for the dollar's demise but ourselves.

US debt sets stage for inflation

What's more intriguing is why the surplus countries bought into this -- well, let's call it what it was -- global Ponzi scheme. It wasn't because the financial experts in these countries were stupid. Many of them clearly saw the scam for what it was. Gao Xiqing, an adviser to then-Chinese Premier Zhu Rongji, said in 2000 "that if you look at every one of these (derivative) products, they make sense. But in aggregate, they are bull----. They are crap. They serve to cheat people."

But the surplus countries had as much incentive to believe in the short-term solution as the deficit countries did. Once you hold $500 billion in Treasurys, you aren't inclined to say, "Hey, these are not as safe as I thought." When you need higher yields to feed an underfunded state pension plan, you're not inclined to say, "You know these aren't really suitable for a pension fund."

And so, as the risks grew, more-extravagant instruments were needed to keep the money circulating around the globe. And then, one day, the bust in the U.S. housing market, what could have been a relatively small event in a universe with less leverage and less riding on unsustainable guarantees, showed that the system was built on smoke and mirrors.

And the money stopped circulating. And the global economy ground slower and slower in a devastating credit crunch.

How to fix the global economy

As a side note, the Fed has also, given the size of its bid (which will likely be increased), enabled the Chinese to sell their Treasury holdings if they want. Then the question is, what will the Chinese buy with those "liberated" dollars? My guess: the hard assets that China needs.

To sum up: Quantitative easing, unfortunately, is an outcome that I always knew would occur, though it still shocked me when Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke finally pulled the trigger. The masthead of my Web site reads, "In a social democracy with a fiat currency, all roads lead to inflation." Many people have been confused because they thought that it meant every negative outcome would lead to inflation directly, but that isn't the case. It's the response to the problems that leads to the inflation (and currency debasement).

We are attempting to print our way to prosperity (see "The Fed embraces inflation," my June 2, 2008, column). That can't be done, any more than we could speculate our way to prosperity during the stock bubble or borrow our way to prosperity in the real-estate/credit bubble. Got gold?

Got Gold?

March 9 (Bloomberg) -- The value of global financial assets including stocks, bonds and currencies probably fell by more than $50 trillion in 2008, equivalent to a year of world gross domestic product, according to an Asian Development Bank report.

Asia excluding Japan probably lost about $9.6 trillion, while the Latin American region saw the value of financial assets drop by about $2.1 trillion, said Claudio Loser, a former International Monetary Fund director and the author of the report that was commissioned by the ADB. The report didn’t give a breakdown of asset declines in other regions.

Global Financial Assets Lost $50 Trillion Last Year, ADB Says