This post provides links to a number of thought-provoking articles I have read over the past few days that you may also find of interest.

• Andy Kessler (The Wall Street Journal): The Bernanke market, July 16, 2009, We won’t get real growth until Congress and Treasury get policy right.

• Irwin Stelzer (Times Online): American account: Barack Obama’s cures may just kill any recovery, July 12, 2009.

• Paul McCulley (Pimco - Global Central Bank Focus): What if?, So what should Washington do, if and when - and I stress “if and when”; I’m not making a forecast here! - private sector aggregate (nominal) demand growth looks like it’s going to languish in Japan style for the indefinite future? The answer: Take one cup of Krugman’s advice for Japan and two cups of Bernanke’s advice for Japan - responsibly

I was kind of dozing, idly dreaming of playing golf, where if I wasn’t putting the ball right into the cup from 25 feet away, then I was chipping it in from 25 yards out, wowing the crowd with deft wedge action, whereupon my caddy, a beautiful girl in a bikini and stiletto heels, would say, “Oooh! Nice one! You are so good that it gets me hot! I am panting for you, my Hot Mogambo Golfing Stud (HMGS)!”

Suddenly, I was jolted rudely awake by alarms ringing in the Mogambo Bunker Of Paranoid Delusions (MBOPD) at the news of a drop of $40 billion of Total Fed Credit last week. Wow! This is the “money” that magically appears, literally “out of thin air, as a new credit on the books of the banks, which they can then loan out some Huge Freaking Multiple (HFM) of that little bit of new

O! Bama! Whither takest thou us? There are two broad theories concerning the great men of history. One says that history is made by great men. The other says great men are made by history. But here at The Daily Reckoning we think they’re both wrong. In our book, great men don’t really exist. They are merely invented by the historians. History needs heroes. Sometimes tragic heroes… sometimes comic… the historians take what they’ve got to work with and set them spinning. But if you look at their leading characters closely, they look little different from the rest of us… just fellow passengers on the big bus.

Poor Obama. He seems like such a likable fellow. He would probably make a good college president. Or a good butcher. You’d enjoy going into his shop to buy cutlets.

But now the poor man finds himself in what has to be

As the markets would tell it, the swine flu epidemic is little more than a tempest in a teacup. But, sad to say, the danger here remains far greater than it seems…

Before we begin, a word in honor of Monday’s stage-five rocket launch of a rally. Or should I say, rally on top of rally.

As a caveat, these words are being written some two hours and change before market close. Regardless of where that close may be, however, it simply must be said – watching what seemed to be nearly every risk-related asset in the world catch a gigantic bid simultaneously was, in a word, awesome.

(Your humble editor was so transfixed by the sight, he felt verbally transported back to his seventh-grade skateboarding days.)

The world, it seems, is pounding the table for a V-shaped recovery. Maybe even a slightly leftward-tilting V, to