CLibertyC

Poor Economy = Low Gold Price?

"By the time 1979 hit, inflation was rising, gas prices were soaring, incomes were dropping, and mortgage rates were climbing. The S&P was rising, but not so much in real terms. GDP growth was high, but it was clearly not a rosy time for consumers or workers. So how did gold perform during this challenging economic environment? The gold price rose 23% in 1977 and 37% in 1978, both of which are considered economic expansion years. But as things worsened in 1979, the price accelerated and went into a mania, ending the year with an incredible 127% return." Continue reading →

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Housing…”For-Sale” Supply Wave Hitting Market?

"The housing market has been turbocharged by the greatest direct stimulus in history over the past 18 months. I hear so much that the past year 'recovery' has to be 'organic' because the 'government' is not providing any stimulus or subsidies. Perhaps, technically they are correct because the Fed is not a government agency. But when you factor in the power of the Fed buying rates down from 5.5% in 2011 to 3.25% in 2012/13 on demand and 6.5 million mortgage mods on supply you come up with a very volatile situation if that go-go-juice is ever taken away. And it was just taken away." Continue reading →

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The Case for Fed Tapering Sooner Rather Than Later

"The best way to (ahem) get the attention of the political class is to taper now, trigger a stock market decline and speak directly to the elected leadership's need to put the fiscal house in order. This is the only way the Fed can escape taking the bullet during the next financial crisis. 'We told you so' is much better than 'we did everything we could and it still fell apart.' Better to engineer a mini-crisis while you're still in control than let a crisis you can't control run away from you, and better to pass the ticking time-bomb to the elected leadership while you still can." Continue reading →

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This Could Shake Muni Bonds to the Core

"Detroit went bankrupt, but so what? Its own decades-long gross political mismanagement, corruption and incompetence pushed the city over the cliff into bankruptcy. Why should we care? The largest Chapter 9 filing in U.S. history will reverberate well beyond this once- bustling city and its creditors. What's most threatening to muni bond investors, and in fact all investors, is whether the city's general obligation bonds are secured or unsecured issues. General obligation bonds, backed by a city's ability to levy taxes to pay interest and principal, are thought to be the safest of all munis. Detroit is putting this to the test." Continue reading →

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NEW Spying Scandal — Is This One the Last Straw?

"The DEA unit responsible for this program is a secret organization. It cannot be investigated by defense attorneys or called into court. Even the location of the Special Operations Division is classified. Now Your so-called 'representatives' promised you that the NSA only spies on those associated with foreign terrorists. They’ve insisted that there is no domestic aspect to this spying. You now know this to be untrue. It’s just one more lie. So let me ask you ... When will enough be enough ? At what point does our so-called government cease to be legitimate? At what point do we declare it to be a criminal entity?" Continue reading →

Continue ReadingNEW Spying Scandal — Is This One the Last Straw?

Why College Football Will Be Dead Within 20 Years

"An acronym that has higher education administrators very worried is MOOC - Massive Open Online Course. In short, a MOOC is a tuition-free online course that can be taught to a massive number of students simultaneously. Pundits often talk about 'disruptive technology'; technology that brings about massive changes in life, business, or the economy. The phrase can be overused, but if anything qualifies, MOOCs are it. It's one thing to offer a course for free online, but the idea is crazy, right, that a college or university could replace traditional classroom education with online coursework for credit or even offer an entire degree online for free?" Continue reading →

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Bad Day for Beltway Liberalism: August 5, 2013

"The reporters who work for the Post are in the wrong profession. Their peers in Boston could do nothing. They sat their until most were fired, one by one. They will suffer the same fate. The industry is a buggy whip. The industry was liberalism’s trifecta: newspapers, television networks, and the school system. Two are bleeding red ink. The third soon will be, as online education enables students to live at home, take courses online, graduate with accredited degrees, and pay $15,000 in tuition, total. A widely accepted estimate is that half of all American universities will go under over the next five decades." Continue reading →

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Amazon.com Creates 5,000 Jobs, Destroys 25,000 in the Process?

"Amazon has managed to grow to its current level with just about 89,000 employees, or almost exactly half of TJX’s workforce. To do that yet pull down 150% more revenue makes Amazon about five times more efficient than TJX, measured by retail sales per staffer. Amazon is able to do so because the number of shoppers who can be served per warehouse employee is much higher than at a typical retail location—especially the smaller stores that TJX mostly uses. One IT guy can take the midnight shift and keep a few thousand servers up and running, but one janitor cannot clean the floors at two locations, let alone 400." Continue reading →

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Meet Tian Yu: The woman who nearly killed herself making your iPad

"Tian Yu worked more than 12 hours a day, six days a week. She had to skip meals to do overtime. Then she threw herself from a fourth-floor window. Without its No 1 supplier, the Cupertino giant’s current riches would be unimaginable: in 2010, Longhua employees made 137,000 iPhones a day, or around 90 a minute. That same year, 18 workers – none older than 25 – attempted suicide at Foxconn facilities. Fourteen died. Tian Yu was one of the lucky ones: emerging from a 12-day coma, she was left with fractures to her spine and hips and paralysed from the waist down. She was 17." Continue reading →

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China Is Ending Its “One-Child Policy” – Here Are The Implications

"The one-child-policy is very unpopular. [..] Currently, a second child is permitted if both parents are singletons. Rural families can have a second child if the first-born is a girl. Some provinces have even looser policies for rural families. There are also other exceptions for a second child, and minority ethnic groups are allowed to have two or even more children. Families which have more children than the policy allows are subject to fines under the name of social maintenance fees. The fee amount varies across the nation, but usually is at least 2-6 times of the higher of annual family income and average local household disposable income." Continue reading →

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