Economics

‘The Fed Is Trying Like Crazy, But Nothing It’s Doing Can Save The Economy’

"David Rosenberg, the veteran Wall Street economist and bearish strategist at Gluskin Sheff, gave an intense presentation on Friday at John Mauldin's Strategic Investment Conference. Titled 'Bernanke: The Wizard Of Potemkin,' this presentation offers a sobering look at the anemic U.S. economy, the labor market mess, and the Federal Reserve's controversial efforts to get everything back on track. Before you can even think about getting bullish, you must consider the eye-opening charts from Rosenberg's presentation." Continue reading →

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Fixing the fast-food strike

"If you are one of the concerned, caring, and vastly indignant activists behind this strike, I’m here to tell you that your social-justice problem has a simple solution. Take out a loan (or put together the money from your like-minded activist friends), buy a franchise from one of the chains, and hire workers at $15 an hour. There, that was simple, wasn’t it? You’ll make money hand over fist and demonstrate to all those eeevil corporations that they can too pay a 'just wage'; they just don’t want to because they’re greedy. The commercial landscape would be alive with virtuous workers’ collectives paying their members fat wages and thumbing their noses at top-hatted plutocrats. Why doesn’t this happen?" Continue reading →

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So you want to invent your own currency

"Our ability to exchange without knowing where things come from blinds us to the real core of the economy: not money, but the physical things we must wrench from the ground by human effort, which is underpinned by agricultural systems, and energised by sunlight, water and soil. The more we abstract and fetishise money as a thing in itself, the more we lose sight of its sources and its goals. We get confused, and feel disempowered relative to those who wield larger flows of it. Sealed off from inquiry in its hermetic shell, money distorts our perceptions of one another. We can’t seem to remember that it is merely one means of exchange among many." Continue reading →

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Peru dethrones Colombia as cocaine king

"With Peru already vying with Colombia in 2011 — it actually was growing 400 hectares of coca more than its neighbor then, although it is thought to have produced less drugs — that means this country is now almost certainly the world’s top source of coca for the manufacture of illegal narcotics. Ricardo Soberon, now a trenchant critic of the government’s counter-narcotics policies, is not holding his breath. 'These figures are a clear indication the government is making incorrect decisions,' said Soberon, who was squeezed out of his job, apparently under pressure from Washington, in 2011, for allegedly being sympathetic to the impoverished, small farmers who grow most of Peru’s coca." Continue reading →

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Ron Paul: Middle of the Road in Healthcare Leads to Socialism

"Beginning in the 1940s, government policies distorted the health care market, causing prices to rise and denying many Americans access to quality care. Congress reacted to the problems caused by their prior interventions with new interventions, such as the HMO Act, ERISA, EMTLA, and various federal entitlement programs. Each new federal intervention not only failed to fix the problems it was supposedly created to solve, it created new problems, leading to calls for even more new federal interventions. This process culminated in 2010. Contrary to the claims of some of its opponents, Obamacare is not socialized medicine. It is corporatized medicine." Continue reading →

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Creative Destruction—The Best Game in Town

"It is a sorrowful reality that for the past century or more, people in the West have for the most part turned increasingly away from the economic system whose creativity redeems it and embraced instead systems whose hallmarks are economic irrationality, resource waste, bureaucratic tyranny, and ultimately mass impoverishment. Perhaps the great economic advances in Asia, where the market has been given wider scope in recent decades, will serve as a lesson to Westerners, pulling them back before they allow their governments to plunge them into the mass poverty from which their ancestors pulled themselves by means of the market system in earlier centuries." Continue reading →

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Bill Bonner: Can paper money survive a full credit cycle?

"A super bank run by super economists? How long would it take for them to blow up the whole world's financial system? But don't worry about it. The system will blow up anyway. No paper money system has ever survived a full credit cycle. That - and not a lack of international monetary reform - is why there are so many bubbles now. When interest rates are falling - often pushed to artificially low levels...and held there for an extremely long time - credit expands and the burden of debt. That has been happening for the last 3 decades. And now, the whole economy depends on something that can't possibly continue. Debt can't grow forever." Continue reading →

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Indians Who Bought Gold, Won. Those Who Didn’t, Lost.

"The idiot Keynesians who ran the Bank of India destroyed the rupee. In India, fathers buy gold for their daughters’ dowries. They don’t buy rupees. India put a tax on gold imports in a vain attempt to save the rupee. It didn’t work. The government hates it when Indians buy gold. This shows a lack of faith in the government. That lack of faith is well deserved. The government said that Indians who bought gold were making a big mistake. But it turns out that Indians who trusted the government’s rupee made the big mistake. If you think it can’t happen here, you could wind up like all those Indians who have lost a quarter of their wealth in recent months. They believed their government. Silly them." Continue reading →

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Jim Rogers: Need to own real assets in India

"Jim Rogers: Your politicians have been making mistakes for decades and every time you just push into the future, the problems get build up and get worse and worse and worse. There are plenty of smart Indians and there are plenty of smart people who could help India. Unfortunately, the government does not listen to them. But if I were doing it, I would abolish all exchange controls, I would abolish all capital controls, I would abolish all subsidies, I would abolish the absurd laws governing a restraining agriculture. I would cut spending so that there is no deficit spending." Continue reading →

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Jim Rogers: Financial Calamity – It’s Coming, Be Worried, Be Careful

Jim Rogers: Financial Calamity – It’s Coming, Be Worried, Be Careful

"Multi-millionaire investor Jim Rogers predicts, 'They're going to take money wherever they can. . . . They're going to take our bank accounts and retirement accounts.' Rogers concludes by saying, 'We've had perilous times, and it's going to get worse. . . It's coming, be worried, be careful.' Join Greg Hunter as he goes One-on-One with Jim Rogers, author of 'Street Smarts, Adventures on the Road and in the Markets.'" Continue reading →

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