It's Tuesday, and the Federal Reserve has just finished its weekly review of M1, M2, M&M's and other measures of the money supply.

We do this by going into the ATMs you hip young people use all weekend long to fuel your irrationally exuberant lifestyles as you careen from singles bars to restaurants to after-hours Trivial Pursuit clubs.  And we figure out how much cash came out of the banks and into the pockets of your tight jeans.

Anyway, what we discovered was very troubling. Something like 95% of you people are taking money out of your accounts and then throwing the ATM slips on the floor! Just flinging them onto the homeless guy sleeping in the corner, as if that's going to make his life any better.

My good friend Gregory Mankiw said in the New York Times that John McCain has one good idea: To reduce the income tax on corporations. Greg's a smart guy, but politics eludes him as it does many great Ivory Tower economists.

Of course lowering the corporate income tax will make all Americans better off and lead to more revenue for the government as the economy reaches new heights. However, the political reality is that we'll never be able to reduce the corporate income tax as long as corporations don't have the right to vote. The corporate income tax paid by American businesses is akin to the stamp tax paid by American colonists or the poll tax imposed on pre-suffrage African Americans. It's unfair and therefore bad for the economy. Without giving corporations the right to vote, no president will garner the support necessary to reduce their tax burden.

People--I could use a little help here.

I'm running around like a one-armed paperhanger, putting out economic fires (and mixing metaphors left and right) and you go and buy "forever" stamps to hedge against future postage increases.

Do you know what a looming overhang that's going to create for the U.S. economy? My children, your children, my goldfish--all of our pets will be paying off today's promise of forever stamps tomorrow.

Take just one sheet of these little fiscal time bombs. You pay $7.38 for eighteen 41 cent stamps. You can use them forever, no matter how much the price of a first-class stamp goes up. Let's say, just for the sake of argument, that in 2010 the price of a stamp is $125,000. Don't laugh--it could happen.

That same sheet of stamps is now worth $2,250,000! It's true--I used a calculator!

You may think I've completely given up on the subprime credit crunch. Well while you were sucking down Coronas and eating chips and salsa this weekend, I figured the whole thing out. It's the hairy eyeball on the back of the dollar.

Take one out of your wallet right now. You don't have any? Well, don't go to a bank--they're not going to lend you one. And don't ask me to give you one. You'll just have to take my word for it. On the back of every dollar bill there's a pyramid with a scary, hairy eyeball on top. Up above is the phrase "Annuit Coeptis", a Latin phrase that means "New, improved taste". Down below appears "Novus Ordo Seclorum", which means "Helps control dandruff."

But the hairy eyeball is literally scaring away currency traders, causing the value of the dollar to fall against the Euro, the Danish kroner, and Upper Deck game-worn jersey cards of the Kansas City Royals. It's that bad.

I think it was Yogi Berra who said "There are lies, damned lies, and statistics." Or maybe Casey Stengel.

Anyway, the point is that most people who throw a lot of statistics around are liars. Like people who say that the dollar was down 5.7% against the Euro Monday. I mean, you can tell that's a lie by all the statistics in it -- 5.7%, Monday, dollar, etc.

I personally don't see what everybody is so worried about. In the dining room at the Federal Reserve, we have gold-plated plates. Think about that. If anything ever went wrong with the dollar, you could bring your paper money to the Federal Reserve and we'd give you a voucher good for lunch at the Federal Reserve cafeteria, fountain drink not included.

Please, people--I've done all I can. Every morning when you pick up your Wall Street Journal you see "The Fed lowered its key rate by a quarter point." Sort of like "NFL Lineman Shot Outside After-Hours Club".  Same story, different day.

Folks, I can't go any lower. When you think of the great Fed Chairmen of the past such as Alan Greenspan, William McChesney Martin, Eugene "Big Daddy" Lipscomb--no wait, he was an NFL lineman--you're not supposed to think of some late-night cable TV ad. 

I'm the chairman of the Federal Reserve Bank, not a used car salesman!  I want my mother to be proud of me when the other women sitting around the pool start in with "My son the oncologist" or "My son the employee benefits lawyer."  I don't want them to seque into "I saw Bernie on TV last night. What was he selling? Dinette sets?"

I get a lot of emails in my Federal Reserve inbox from ordinary people like you saying "I am about to lose my house.  Do something!" 

Why is that my fault?  Did I tell you to listen to the mortgage broker when he said to pick a number between one and a million and he would write it down as your annual income?

If you go to the Federal Reserve website you will see that our job is to "conduct the nation's monetary policy" and  "provide left-handed pinch-hitting power off the bench."  I made up that last one to see if you were paying attention. That's the problem -- what we do is so boring nobody gives a flying fuck at a rolling donut until there's an auctioneer on their front lawn.

That's why we use a Ouija board at the Fed.

After I agreed to speak at Harvard Class Day, a student named Christian Lamb penned an article in The Harvard Crimson suggesting 15 ways I could appear cool. The article is surprisingly pretty funny, though I'd imagine this blog already makes me cool enough already.

Still, I'm advising that the Harvard Crimson not just cease and desist mocking me, but cease and desist in general. When I was at Harvard, I didn't piss around writing articles about quirky bald professors. I was busy with only two matters: Figuring out why past depressions occurred and preventing the next one by contributing to the economy through methods such as waiting tables. I even reported all of my tips in my tax filings.

The Fed Chairmanship is a lonely role. Sometimes I feel like I'm the only one being terrorized by a man so obsessed with his own legacy that he's willing to distort the truth and ruin the lives of others for personal gain. That man is, of course, Alan Greenspan.

It seems Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg has his own Greenspan. Quite literally. Aaron Greenspan, an ex-classmate of Mark's at Harvard, is attempting to stop Facebook from using its name unless he's paid off -- claiming he used the name Facebook first. Little Greenspan makes me ashamed to call myself a Harvard graduate and even made me think twice about putting on my crimson boxer shorts this morning. Mark, much like myself, is hard at work trying to stimulate the economy in his own way.