I know that a lot of people are more bored with finance than they are with politics, but at the moment I think you need to work through your boredom and read the financial pages. Do you know what shortselling is? A hedge fund? Can you tell with certainty who owns your mortgage? Do you know exactly who owns the company that you may one day wish to sue? More importantly, does anyone know exactly who owns it, or is it part of the elaborate shell-game that has been high-end finance over the last 15 years? Like the environment, these are not questions that laypeople should leave for 'the experts' to worry about.

YES. Yes. I constantly worry about the state of willful ignorance that most people live in when it comes to economics.

Of course, I have an advantage, being married to a man with a stockbroker's license who is also an Austrian economist. On the one hand, it's a little terrifying to actually understand what's going on out there. Though, on the other hand, we always know exactly when to fill up the car because he can tell you the price of a barrel of light sweet crude, and which way it's trending... Handy, that.