Today’s news is all about the passing of the $700 billion financial sector bailout. But questions remain. Will it be enough? Is it too much? Who gets stuck with the bill?   It’s a topic everybody is talking about, from the White House to Wall Street, and to the barbershops on Main Street. But nobody seems to be talking about the big elephant in the room—the $3 trillion in foreign debt already on the books.

That money has flowed through the system, much of it into home mortgages, and the real question is how much of the $3 trillion is going to go bad?  Even with the bailout, that makes the U.S. economic future look grim.