By grabbing $26 billion in private pension money last month, Argentina may have put itself on track for its second debt default in a decade – ironically, the very situation that country’s government had hoped its bit of leisure-fund larceny had hoped to avoid.

“The misguided macroeconomic and monetary policies, especially the confiscatory tax policy and huge government spending – much of it inefficient – was doomed to catch up with the country someday,” says Horacio Marquez, a Wall Street veteran, emerging markets specialist and editor of two trading services affiliated with Money Morning: The Money Moves Alert and the Shadow Stock Trader services.

Argentina’s act of not-so-petty larceny was launched late last month when the government, in a surprise move, ordered Argentine pension funds to liquidate their foreign holdings, the first step in a plan to transfer that money into the state pension system. Argentine

And now that the governments of America have literally become the economy (and paying themselves handsomely in the process!), there is no way that the government can be allowed to shrink…

The U.S. Department of Commerce says that, the way it looks to them, even after spending a lot of time adjusting and smoothing and rounding the data so that things look as good as possible, third-quarter Gross Domestic Product is going to be down again - like this is some Big Freaking News (BFN) to us guys out here who are either being laid off, or hearing rumors that we are going to be laid off, or listening to other people yammering about how they were laid off, or being blamed for profit shortfalls and statistically poor performance, but which they calculate without any “smoothing” factors like how the customers are all a bunch of idiots and so are my

In Argentina - where Contrarian Profits is based - falling commodity prices threaten to open a deep hole in the government’s budget. Martin Hutchinson says the county, and other ‘rebel’ states like Russia and Venezuela, has shown little regard for economic laws in recent years. That’s why all three will find it much harder to recover from this crisis.

More from Money Morning:

Four months ago, it appeared that three economic “bad actors” were triumphant in their disregard of economic laws and contempt for the United States: Russia, Venezuela and Argentina. Today, while the iron laws of economics have taken a bite out of all of us, they have taken an especially big chunk out of the economies of these bad actors. Unlike most of us, they will not be quick to recover.

That is good news – for U.S. foreign policy, and for those of us who hope that the

The masks are coming off. It’s the end of the party, now we get to see what people really look like. And it’s not a pretty sight.

You’ll recall that one of the fairest of the Bubble Era’s revelers was the idea that, over the long run, you would make money in stocks. All you had to do was ‘buy and hold.’ Who didn’t like her? She seemed so easy…so willing…so fetching and attractive.

Yesterday, the Dow lost another 203 points. Investors are down 44% so far this year. Worldwide, they’ve lost $10 trillion this month - far worse than the crash of ‘29.

The most successful economy of the 20th century was the United States of America. The second was probably Japan. It rose from the bombed-out ruins of WWII to become a worldwide export powerhouse, dominating the auto and electronic equipment industries.

But yesterday, stock prices in Japan fell to more than