Yearly Archives: 2013

Is The CIA Trying to Kill Pro-US Venezuelan Opposition?

"That is the claim made by Acting President of Venezuela Nicolas Maduro, who served as vice president under the late president, Hugo Chavez. Maduro claims that the US is plotting to assassinate the opposition candidate for president, Henrique Capriles Radonski, who polls suggest has almost no chance to win, and then pin the blame on the Venezuelan government. This, Maduro asserts, will bring about the kind of instability and public protest that the US has encouraged numerous times from the Color Revolutions to the Arab Spring." Continue reading →

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Economists warn Cyprus will face a recession ‘for decades’ after EU deposit tax

"The controversial tax is seen hitting Russian pockets hard, with experts estimating that Russian deposits in Cypriot banks amount to at least 15.4 billion euros of the estimated 67 billion euros of deposits held by Cyprus banks. Russian President Vladimir Putin criticised the proposed tax, describing it, according to a Kremlin spokesman, as 'unfair, unprofessional and dangerous'. Russian Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev was equally forthright. 'We should say this directly: this simply looks like the confiscation of other people’s money,' Russian news agencies quoted him as saying. 'I do not know who the author of this idea is, but this is what it looks like.'" Continue reading →

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Will Grigg: Prison Profiteers

"One aspect of drug prohibition that gets far too little attention is the fact that the drug war is immensely profitable for prohibitionists. No decent person has anything but contempt for Drug Kingpins – but it’s difficult to see how Prohibition Profiteers are any less contemptible. And they’re hardly the only people who have become wealthy by monetizing the misery generated in the prison-industrial complex. Public incarceration is the only consistently growing sector of our increasingly socialized economy." Continue reading →

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Chinese solar panel company defaults on $541 million worth of bonds

"One of the world’s top two solar cell and panel producers, targeted last year by US trade sanctions, Suntech said it had already entered an agreement with 60 percent of the bond holders to hold off legal claims while a debt restructuring can be negotiated. The European Union began an anti-dumping investigation into Chinese solar panels in September last year, followed by an anti-subsidy probe in November. The United States last October confirmed hefty anti-dumping and anti-subsidy duties on Chinese solar cell makers, adding to trade tensions between the two economic powers." Continue reading →

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Junk Bonds Soar in Price as Investors Seek Higher Rates

"Junk bonds are high-risk bonds. They are rated CCC — barely above default status. They pay higher interest rates because there is risk of default. You may not get your money back. The rush to buy junk bonds indicates desperation on the part of investors to get something like a decent return on their money. But to get less than 6%, an investor must put his money at risk — high risk. Investors are saying that they trust Ben Bernanke and the Federal Reserve. They are saying that the FED can create $1 trillion in fiat money from now on, and prices will not rise -- long-term rates will not rise -- the economy will recover." Continue reading →

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Report: Obama officials issued $216 billion in regulations last year

"The Obama administration issued $236 billion worth of new regulations last year, according to a report from a conservative think tank. The analysis from the American Action Forum, led by former Congressional Budget Office Director Douglas Holtz-Eakin, found that the administration added $216 billion in rules and more than $20 billion in regulatory proposals in 2012. Complying with those rules will require an additional 87 million hours of paperwork, the report said. The group put the total price tag from regulations during Obama’s first term at more than $518 billion." Continue reading →

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Stossel: No Regulation? No Problem

"Private companies found they could 'crowd-source' enforcement against fraud and low-quality products, in much the same way that Wikipedia discovered an encyclopedia could be created without a central organizer. Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales tells me that method 'works far better than the top-down system that it replaced.' We almost always assume that top-down government regulation is necessary, even though history says otherwise." Continue reading →

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The Bizarre Government Regulations that May Send Gasoline Prices Through the Roof

"Prices for premium gas are now about 30.2 cents over the price of regular. That is up from 24.1 cents in 2010 and 18.2 cents in 2000 Refiners blame Congress, arguing that the ethanol quota was set at a time when gasoline demand was expected to rise steadily. Instead, demand has declined, and refiners, obligated to blend more ethanol than they can actually use, have resorted to buying a lot of ethanol credits, known as renewable identification numbers (or RINs), to meet the mandated levels. Ms. Lundberg described this as 'buying forgiveness from the government.' The credits' popularity has driven up the price nearly tenfold since January." Continue reading →

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Stop Fooling Ourselves: Americans Can’t Afford the Future

"Simply continuing along the status quo is a vote for digging ourselves deeper as the constraints of the future arrive. Behavior change is necessary in order to improve our chances. At the core of the needed change is redefining prosperity. In modern society, it has largely come to be defined by material possessions, usually assuming that the more (and the more expensive), the better. In the future, we'd do much better to define it by: our health (both physical and emotional), our purpose, our ability to meet our needs sustainably, our relationships, our level of happiness. In sum, all things that were once valued much higher in our culture." Continue reading →

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