Are you following me on Twitter?

For those of you out of the loop, Twitter is a free service that let's you keep touch with friends and acquintances via your mobile device, IM or the Web -- all in real-time. From celebrity spotting to spreading the word about news events and instant reactions to them, popular Twitter has become a personal, portable news wire service for its millions of fans.

Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey sat down with me to discuss the growing trend that's sometimes called microblogging. We drilled into:

• The popularity of groups on Twitter
• Summer of too many outages
• Startup money amid the credit crisis
• Growing around the globe
• And -- the big question -- what's the revenue/business model.

Twitter thrives on community interaction, and in that spirit I put out a call to my followers to provide questions for the company's CEO, Jack Dorsey, whom I sat down with to discuss the microblogging phenomenon.

Among the questions provided:

• Will Twitter ever be a nonprofit Web utility, à la Mozilla? (@andygadiel)
• What's your business plan again? (@dougw)
• Will Twitter provide more analytic tools for users? (@theschnaz)
• And, finally, is Twitter addictive? (yours truly)

Twitter thrives on community interaction, and in that spirit I put out a call to my followers to provide questions for the company's CEO, Jack Dorsey, whom I sat down with to discuss the microblogging phenomenon.

Among the questions provided:

• Will Twitter ever be a nonprofit Web utility, à la Mozilla? (@andygadiel)
• What's your business plan again? (@dougw)
• Will Twitter provide more analytic tools for users? (@theschnaz)
• And, finally, is Twitter addictive? (yours truly)

Other than John McCain's proposal to buy bad mortgages, last night's presidential debate contained scant few new ideas for dealing with the worsening crisis in housing and the financial markets.

Both candidates need to start moving beyond their stump speeches -- and quickly, says RGE Monitor chairman Nouriel Roubini, whose forecasts about the credit cycle to date have been frighteningly accurate.

In the accompanying video, the NYU economics professor ticks off a number of suggestions for whoever wins the election:

• Replace Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson and Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke. "We need a clean slate to restore confidence," he says, suggesting market participants have lost faith in current regulators.
• Start a $300 billion government works program focused on repairing and expanding our infrastructure. Yes, a new New Deal.
• Create a blanket guarantee for all bank deposits. Even with the FDIC raising its insurance limit to $250,000, there's still $2 trillion of uninsured assets in American banks and that money is moving overseas to places like Ireland, which have granted blanket guarantees.
• Revise the $700 billion bailout plan (or TARP) so that it just doesn't buy toxic mortgage securities but directly helps recapitalize the banks.

For the record, Roubini isn't officially advising any policymakers right now. But he is attending the IMF meeting this weekend and almost certainly will be giving "informal" advice to any and all takers.

This morning's globally coordianated rate cut may have temporarily boosted the stock markets (very temporarily, it turned out), but our guest Nouriel Roubini sees more trouble ahead. Specifically, he predicts more U.S. banks failures -- perhaps even a major one.

The past few months support his case, with such stalwarts as Lehman Bros., AIG, Wachovia, and WaMu biting the dust, and in the accompanying video Roubini estimates that "a couple hundred" smaller regional banks are next in line. What about a bigger fish? The NYU Stern School economist and chairman of RGE Monitor cites the technical insolvency of Citigroup in the early '90s -- when the housing market was down a comparatively measly 5% -- as a sign that major financial institutions are increasingly vulnerable.

Wouldn't the U.S. government take just about any step to prevent such a disaster? "Eventually, a government takeover of the biggest bank in the United States is a possibility," Roubini says of Citi, thereby shoring up the economy at the expense of shareholders, creditors, and possibly uninsured depositors -- another argument for his proposal of a blanket guarantee on bank deposits.

The dramatic meltdown of the financial markets has shifted focus from the real economy, which our guest, RGE Monitor chairman Nouriel Roubini, says is where the downturn is truly being felt. The $700 billion bailout and today's global rate cuts may have helped avert a complete financial collapse, the NYU Stern School economist notes. But the recession -- which he says began in Q1 of this year -- is deepening and will last into early 2010.

Retail and personal spending fell sharply over the summer, marking a drop in consumption for the first time since 1991 -- and the Q3 numbers are only going to be worse, says Roubini. Moreover, corporate capital spending is down, which will translate into even fewer jobs in the coming months.

Is Roubini simply being too bearish? "I worry that it'll be worse than I expected," he says in the accompanying video, in which he predicts a slow, possibly L-shaped recovery a la Japan.

Today's global rate cuts have reduced the risk of a market crash, but won't resolve the underlying crisis, says NYU economist Nouriel Roubini of RGE Monitor.

But the financial market crisis has unfolded even quicker than Roubini expected (which is saying something), and the economist now thinks the Dow and S&P will suffer 50% declines from last October's peak vs. 40% previously.

In other words, the Dow is going to 7,000, but over the course of months vs. days if Roubini is right, as -- unfortunately for bulls -- he mostly has been for the past two years.

"The policy response is going to become more aggressive [but] a steady flow of bad financial and macro economic news is going to push down equity markets," he says, forecasting a real bottom won't be hit until "sometime next year."

Because of growing slack in the global economy, Roubini says deflation is going to become a much bigger threat in the next six months vs. inflation. In such an environment, cash, Treasuries and gold are the only safe bets he says -- provided your holdings are within the FDIC's new $250,000 insurance cap.

The coordinated global rate cut was helpful but not enough, NYU professor and economist Nouriel Roubini told us this morning. The central banks should have cut at least 100 basis points, Roubini says. World governments should also immediately band together and put together a comprehensive plan:

• Guarantee all bank deposits temporarily (not just up to $250,000, and not just in the United States).
• Triage the banking system by recapitalizing survivors with equity injections and letting the rest die.
• Get ahead of the crisis instead of looking panicky and reactive; failure to do so continues to undermine confidence, Roubini says.

Roubini's best-case scenario? “At this point, the recession train has left the station. The financial and banking crisis has left the station. We’re going to have a severe recession. We’re going to have a severe financial crisis. What we can avoid is a systemic collapse of the financial system. And the corporate sector is going to lead us to something close to the Great Depression or to what happened to Japan, with a stagnation of economic growth for a decade. So at this point, it’s going to be ugly regardless, but at this point we can avoid a total meltdown of the system and a multi-year collapse of the global economy.”

After hovering around break-even for much of the day, stocks started selling off after a 1:15 p.m. EDT speech by Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke, and careened lower in the close.

"The outlook for economic growth has worsened and that the downside risks to growth have increased," Bernanke said, giving strong hints that Fed rate cuts may be forthcoming.

Perhaps traders were disappointed the Chairman merely hinted at a rate cut, rather than delivering. But anyone hoping government plans to buy commercial paper (confirmed Tuesday) or strong hints at a coming rate cut would restore investor confidence just hasn't been paying very close attention.

The reality is "the Federal Reserve, the Treasury, and other agencies are committed to restoring market stability and are working assiduously to ensure that the financial system is able to perform its critical economic functions," as Bernanke put it, ticking off a laundry list of multi-agency initiatives, including:

• New facility to purchase commercial paper directly from eligible issuers.
• Paying interest on bank reserves.
• Providing a temporary guarantee program for assets in money market mutual funds.
• "Substantially broadening" the collateral accepted by the Fed's Primary Dealer Credit Facility (PDCF) and Term Securities Lending Facility (TSLF). ("As of last Wednesday [these programs] were providing more than $800 billion of liquidity to the financial system," Bernanke said.)
• Significantly expanded reciprocal currency arrangements (so-called swap agreements) with foreign central banks.
• Provided emergency credit to AIG.
• Authorized the FDIC to use its funds to facilitate the sale of Wachovia's banking operations without loss to creditors. (Regardless of the outcome of the Citi-Wells standoff, "all depositors and creditors of Wachovia are fully protected, and depositors and other customers will experience no interruption in banking services," he said.)

The problem isn't a lack of effort on the government's part - far from form it. The problem is that the efforts, to date, have failed to alleviate the crisis, which is roiling financial markets worldwide and showing no signs of abating.

Warren Buffett certainly knows how to get value for his money: The stake he put into Goldman Sachs last month not only netted him $5 billion in preferred stock and warrants to buy $5 billion in common stock at $115 a share, it boosted one of the last investment banks standing and all but cemented his reputation as market sage and white knight investor. But is the praise misplaced?

When it comes to calling the current economic crisis, "This guy has had it on the screws the last five years," says Jeff Matthews, general partner at Ram Partners, blogger, and author of the upcoming Buffett tome Pilgrimage to Warren Buffett's Omaha.

In the accompanying video, Matthews cites Buffett's prescient 2002 warnings of the risks of derivatives and the waning of the dollar, but warns against following Buffett's investing lead: "I wouldn't rush out and buy GE, for instance, or Goldman Sachs just because he got a nice, fat preferred from them."

Clearly, the line between fiscal altruist and savvy capitalist isn't so clear cut. Buffett's latest moves suggest caution, Matthews says, noting they are a far cry from what he calls "the all-time best market call" in history: In 1974, when Buffett told Forbes that "now was the time to buy stocks and get rich."