Neel Kashkari, the at-the-time little-known Goldman Sachs banker who was put in charge (by Treasury Secretary and former Goldman Sachs CEO Hank Paulson) of the Troubled Asset Relief Program (that is, the bank bailouts) in 2008, has been named the new president of the Minneapolis Federal Reserve Bank.

A shipment of $93 million in cash, traveling from Zurich to the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, arrived with $1.2 million missing, according to ABC News. The shortage wasn't noticed till the Fed counted the money, which had left Switzerland on Saturday in three sealed crates bound for JFK Airport.

Today, New York Times columnist and Nobel prize winning economist Paul Krugman wrote that President Obama should be "absolutely" prepared to mint a one trillion dollar platinum coin and use it to pay the government's bills. It wasn't a typo: a lot of people are discussing the trillion-dollar coin as a way to avoid a fight over the debt ceiling. But what is it? And why? And whose face will be on it? Here's our guide.

Are American right-wing terrorists no longer competitive in their own country? Fifteen years ago, any terrorist plot against the New York Federal Reserve building would surely have been the product of one of our many fine homegrown white-nationalist separatist Christians, trying to stop Barack Maobama's Jewish bankers from taxing white babies. But now foreign-born students are moving here, and beating out our terrorists for some of the best plots: Today, the FBI arrested a 21-year-old Bangladeshi student, Quazi Mohammad Rezwanul Ahsan Nafis, for attempting to blow up the Fed building 1,000 pounds of explosives. Where's Thomas Friedman when you need him?

Alas, a 97-page paper isn't the longest ever delivered at the Federal Reserve symposium, but it's still really boring.

The Federal Reserve is working toward monitoring Facebook and Twitter to find out what people online are saying about the government bank's discount rate, open market operations and overall monetary policy. Do we tell them now that no one on Facebook or Twitter has ever given a shit about any of those things, or leave it for a surprise?

The Federal Reserve's Open Market Committee responded to congressional Republicans' unprecedented letter warning that "further intervention by the Federal Reserve could exacerbate current problems or further harm the U.S. economy" by, well, intervening further anyway! Slightly further. Helpfully further? Eh, probably not.

Doing their part to keep the struggling U.S. Postal Service afloat, Congressional Republican leaders sent a letter a to Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke on Tuesday, demanding that he stop doing whatever it is that he's thinking of doing to help the economy, because they said so.

The Republican party's sudden hatred of the Federal Reserve and easier monetary policy, as encapsulated by Rick Perry's suggestion that Fed chairman Ben Bernanke might be committing "treason" by "printing money," is considered a vindication of Rep. Ron Paul's growing ideological clout among the party's rank-and-file. Ron Paul's goal for several decades has been to eliminate the Federal Reserve, after all! And yet even he thinks that Perry's comments were kind of insane.

Elaborate political satire "Rick Perry" (played by Josh Brolin) hasn't executed an innocent man in at least a few months. But he's got his eye on someone: Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke!

The Federal Reserve vaults are sitting on $1 billion — that's with a "b" — in unused one-dollar coins, shunned currency that has been piling up since 2007, when a government program made their production compulsory. That number could double by 2016, when the program is scheduled to end.

So this, this is what a web video for a presidential campaign with no money looks like: Get out the video camera, Metro over to the Federal Reserve for a couple of exterior shots, Metro back to some closet you rent out as an office, and babble about a Federal Reserve audit that already has plenty of support in Congress with or without a once-in-a-century intellectual force like Newt Gingrich as the driving force behind it.

Rep. Ron Paul, whose career goal is to destroy the Federal Reserve, will chair the subcommittee overseeing the Federal Reserve.

The Fed will buy $600 billion in U.S. debt. No one really knows if this will do any good.

So hot-shot MIT economist Peter Diamond won a Nobel Prize in Economics today, remember? Good for him. Now can the single senator who's blocked Diamond's confirmation to the Federal Reserve board for months, over a lack of qualifications, maybe reconsider that?

Congressman Ron Paul says it's a "possibility" that there's no gold at Fort Knox or the New York Fed. He may be right about the latter: The bad guys in Die Hard 3 did steal a lot of that gold.

Columbia University President Lee Bollinger will chair the New York Fed's board of directors.

Last year's financial collapse was made possible by the greed and incompetence of credit rating agencies, who got paid to lie about the value of subprime debt. It turns out they were responsible for the Goldman Sachs bailout, too.

The nice thing about Eliot Spitzer's post-politics career? He's still in politics. But because he doesn't have an office to run for all the time, he's basically saying whatever he wants. Like calling the Federal Reserve a "ponzi scheme."