The Mount Washington Hotel is in Carroll, New Hampshire. It is not the hotel featured in the Jack Nicholson movie "The Shining." That was the Timberline Lodge near Mount Hood, Oregon. So it's ok to stay in rooms 215 and 217 (or is it 415 and 417 ?) The hotel's...

Spent on infrastructure that is. The Pharaohs maybe don't count with the pyramids, but Thomas Jefferson built canals. Teddy R. was into power generation, and FDR rebuilt all of America. Even Herbert Hoover saw the benefits of government-backed public works projects and oversaw the construction of some 360 public buildings....

The Federal Reserve lowered the Fed Funds rate on Wednesday to 1%. The move was widely expected but it's still important for a few reasons. First, Main Street was expecting it and now is not the time to disappoint people after they have had the shock of opening their 401-K...

They should have passed the first two and a half page proposal! Our elected representatives said they needed more time to consider such sweeping and important legislation. What they wanted was time to dress the bill up with bells and whistles that make McCain's tirade against earmarks sensible. Two Oregon...

Hank Paulson needs to go to a Dale Carnegie Sales course. Half of you probably never heard of that but he needs to go to some sort of sales seminar to learn how to sell a program and not try to ram it down people's throats. It clearly wasn't enough...

I wouldn't go overboard with the thought that Warren Buffet's purchase of Goldman preferred stock is a vote of confidence in the financial system of the United States. I think it's a great example of an astute financier making a good businessman's investment.

He bought a preferred...

Federal Reserve Chairman Bernanke threw the dollar under the bus yesterday. In trying to achieve market stability, he, and Secretary Paulson, only rattled the cage. I believe the market sold off on the belief that if we aren't going to defend our currency, why would anyone bother to buy financial...

Everyone else is writing about Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac so I figured I would as well. The two companies play a central, indeed, the central role in the mortgage marketplace. They don't make mortgages. They buy mortgages from originating banks and repackage them as bonds or keep them on...

There was some heat being generated on Larry Kudlow's show last night as all of us, Kudlow, Farrell, Michael Pento, and Jack Gage of Forbes all read the markets horrendous action the same way. The downturn was a complete in your face repudiation of the Fed's decision to not raise...

More big names are adding their voices to the growing chorus of opinion that the worst of the credit crisis is behind us. In addition to the heads of Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs, add Jamie Dimon of J.P.Morgan, Mark Mobius of Templeton Asset Management, and Richard Fuld, the...

Stanley Kubrick directed the 1957 classic "Paths of Glory" starring Kirk Douglas and Adolphe Menjou. It is the story, patterned on actual events of 1917, of four sacrificial lambs executed after a failed French advance against the entrenched German army. The enraged French Generals picked four soldiers, tried them, and...

There will be a lot of economic news this week. There is every week but we seem so much more fixated on the announcements now. The most important comes this Friday with the monthly jobs report. Consensus calls for a small gain of 30,000, but there was a very good...

Microsoft offers a knockout blow to acquire Yahoo for $44 billion or about $31 a share vs. $19 where it closed yesterday. It's a hostile bid (why wouldn't Jerry Yang embrace this?) so the price reflects a Murdoch type strategy to crush any theoretical opposition with an offer that can't...

Vince Farrell is a principal of Scotsman Capital, a New York money management firm, and a CNBC contributor. He chronicled his thoughts over one of the must turbulent weeks Wall Street has seen in years, and he shares them with us below.

MONDAY, JANUARY 21
10:00 PM
Hang...