I have caught myself sounding like a broken record recently, listing all the records that we are setting in the markets.

Let's go for broke: Gold and silver have set new records. The Chinese yuan has set a post-revaluation record high, the Swiss franc and the Singapore dollar have reached a record against the greenback, Indonesia's stock market is at an all-time record high, Brazil's Petrobras set a global record for a share sale.... and the first prize list could go on.

Mort Zuckerman's latest US News & World Report column analyzes what went wrong in the housing market.

For the baby boomer generation, a home is now seen not as the cornerstone of advancement but a ball and chain, Zuckerman writes.

And he brings a boatload of statistics to the table to back it up.

Here are some of the grim numbers:

"I mean, no one was being held with a gun to their head and forced to work at Morgan Stanley." So begins Leon Neyfakh's article in the New York Observer on the tech life on Wall Street.

Smart tech guys live to work on complicated technical problems — and are often motivated to take jobs by a desire innovate and build intellectually satisfying solutions as much as for the money. Many are sold on an employer on the basis of its street cred as a "hacker-oriented shop"

But after a while on Wall Street, disillusionment can set in.

Goldman Sachs may be losing some of its proprietary traders thanks to Volcker rule restrictions on betting the firm's own capital. But the firm is hardly getting out of trading.

In fact, Goldman has recently given mandates to recruiters to seek out quants for its trading operations in both its Quantitative Investment Strategies group and its high frequency trading operations.

These are high-level positions. The QIS job requires a PhD and at least three years of experience in finance. It involves doing quantitative portfolio research for Goldman’s Algorithmic trading desk, which trades currencies, futures and equities. Basically, these are the guys that program the squid’s tentacles.

The other quant position is at Goldman’s designated market-marker arm at the New York Stock Exchange. This is the gang that runs the high-frequency trading ops of Goldman.

Investing in gold has been one of the best ideas of the past couple of years.

Gold December futurespassed $1300 for the first time. The potential for dollar-weakening further Fed easing is likely a driver behind the continued rise. If the economy continues to weaken, the Fed may push more dollars into the economy by purchasing more debt securities. This could hurt the dollar, and lead to a rise in the price of gold.

Which is why a smart hedge fund manager would start shorting gold.

Let me explain right away that this is not a prediction about the direction of the price of gold. I suspect that the tendency of a deficit spending government concerned with high unemployment will be to debase the dollar, which implies a nominal rise in the price of gold. Bernanke is a believer in the power of inflationary policy to spur the economy. Fundamentally, this should be a bullish analysis for gold.

It is no shocker that the Senate delayed its vote on extending the Bush Tax Cuts till after the election.

But this delay is just adding to the uncertainty hanging over the U.S. economy. Our great country is sick. She's bloated from drinking too much from the debt well and we have politicians on both sides of the aisle fighting like children and pushing back the inevitable vote.

While this finger pointing, "I'm rubber, you're glue" game is played on Capitol Hill, there are new taxes coming down the pike next year that will impact Middle America, the very taxpayers that President Obama says he wants help.

Pete Sepp, Executive Vice President of the National Taxpayers Union \(NTU\) tells me while the focus is on the 2001 and 2003 tax cuts, there are new tax problems looming for the middle class.

Federal government will sell low percentage of G.M. stock in order to fetch highest price. (New York Times) Analysts seem to find consensus that it will take years for gov’t to recoup its $43 billion investment.

Though very few hedge funds on the Street can claim to compare to the 17-year track record of David Tepper’s Appaloosa Management, LP, the only thing that is consistent about the performance of the fund is that it is, well, inconsistent.

“We’re consistently inconsistent”, the legendary billionaire investor says over a lunch of spicy tuna rolls and salad at his office in Short Hills, NJ, earlier this week. “It’s one of the cornerstones of our success.”

Inconsistent maybe. Incredible, certainly. Last year, Tepper’s flagship Appaloosa fund returned an eye-popping 132.7%, net of fees, after grossing $7.5 billion by betting on financials early on, more than any other hedge fund firm last year. Through July of this year, the fund is up almost 42% on a net trailing annulized basis, according to performance documents from an investor.

When Lehman Brothers filed for bankruptcy in September 2008, investors panicked on Wall Street, causing dangerous aftershocks across the markets. And while most of Appaloosa’s peers were desperately trying to mitigate losses and stave off redemption requests amidst the market’s free fall, Tepper decided it was the perfect time to leap right into the eye of the storm.

WSJ deems Wall Street 2 subprime —but will Fandango sell me tickets at 15 cents on the dollar? (Wall Street Journal)

Buffett: "We're still in a recession" (Reuters)

The next time your annoying coworker defines a recession as two consecutive quarters of negative GDP growth, tell him Warren Buffet thinks he’s an idiot.

PIIGS still pigs (Yahoo) Ireland’s GDP report increases concerns for Europe’s most indebted nations.

The next time someone offers to sell your nana corporate paper with a 9% YTM... \(BusinessWeek\) You have my permission to sock them.

Phil Falcone has$9 billion and ambitious plans to build a next generation mobile broadband network using satellites and a network of unbuilt terrestrial towers — but can he pull it off?