Jon Stewart interviews Alan Greenspan on The Daily Show. Greenspan has been busy promoting his new book, The Age of Turbulence, and has been talking to anyone willing to listen.

Here’s an excerpt from the interview:

Stewart: So they’ve made a choice, we would like to favor those who invest in the stock market and not those who invest in the bank; that helps us.

Greenspan: That’s the way it comes out but that’s not the way to think about it.

Stewart: It seems to me that we favor investment but we don’t favor work. The vast majority of people work and they pay payroll taxes and they use banks. And then there’s this whole other world of hedge funds and short betting and…it seems like craps. And they keep saying, “No no no, don’t worry about it, it’s free market, that’s why we live in much bigger houses. But it really isn’t, it’s the fed, or some other thing, no?”

Greenspan also goes on to admit that quality of forecasting hasn’t improved in the past 50 years and that basically they’re clueless about preventing economic bubbles and human nature is to blame for that!

Anyway, check out the video. It’s pretty good.

Also check out Minyanville’s opinion on the rate cut.

The New York Times had an article about the working class millionaires living in San Francisco. According to WSJ, “you know a media-generated controversy has reached it’s peak when it lampooned by The Onion”.

Here’s a spoof segment from the Onion News Network. Apparently the gap between the rich and the super-rich is widening and they’re feeling disenfranchised.

“The average investment banker is only able to afford one boat. But the super-rich family will have upwards of five, six, seven boats. You have to have a decent yacht.”

“If the rich were just a little bit more motivated,” one says, “they wouldn’t be such a drain on society.”

The Russian government is sponsoring a “Day of Conception” today. Officials in the Volga River region (a demographically deficient zone about 550 miles east of Moscow) are giving couples a half day today to go home and make babies. Couples that give birth to a child nine months from
today, a Russian national holiday, are eligible to win cars, cash & even a shiny new refrigerator.

Since the Soviet collapse in 1991, population has been in steady decline thanks to lower birth rates, shorter life expectancies, emigration surges and a truly horrible health care system.

The world’s largest country by land mass is inhabited by only 141 million people. AP predicts that number could shrink to 100 million by 2050.

Putin has already installed cash subsidies for couples giving birth to more than one child. Last year, he went on record saying this demographic crisis is the country’s most severe predicament.

Here’s a funny video. Make sure you’ve turned up your speakers or you won’t fully enjoy it.