Japan 's finance minister and an ECB governing council member agreed on the need to cautiously watch the economic outlook even though both Japan and the euro zone economies logged expansion in the third quarter, a Finance Ministry official said on Monday.

AS he spoke about the economy on Tuesday, President Obama invoked the parable in the Sermon on the Mount about two houses, one built on sand only to be blown away in a storm and another built on rock impervious to the swirling winds.Read at http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/apr/14/barack-obama-economy-speech-...

The idea – part of the proposed $850 billion economic stimulus package under consideration in Congress – is one of the reasons for the establishment of a new website, ReadTheStimulus.org, which is trying to collect volunteers to analyze the dollars and cents written into the 300-plus-page plan."One of the additional features we want to add … is more detail on the actual dollar amounts being appropriated in the bill text," the website says. "But to do that, we need to extract out all the individual appropriations and put them in a spreadsheet.

On March 3rd Gold fell for the eighth straight day, in its longest consecutive drop since June 2006. This is thought to be for several reasons. The first reason is that government efforts to stimulate the economy reduced fears of a worsening recession, thereby reducing demand for gold as a safe haven.