Two interesting finance and investment posts by David Merkel at The Aleph Blog....................

Excerpt from Post the First:

The main thing to understand here is that the government is not here to help you, but to milk you.  The government does not care about you.  It cares about its survival.  If it can’t get sufficient taxes out of the populace, it will use its financing arm, the central bank, to lend to it at preferential rates, while passing on losses to the populace via inflation. 
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Excerpt from Post the Second:

The main idea is this: buy companies with better prospects than those being sold.