Economics

Nigel Farage: There is a Gathering Electoral Storm

"With 62% youth unemployment in Greece, and with Spain not far behind, it is perhaps about time we were honest and admitted we are causing it ourselves. And yet your recipe is more bureaucracy. A youth guarantee scheme, another six billion for the Youth Employment Initiative, the setting up of the European Alliance for Apprenticeships backed up by the Quality Framework for Traineeships, and the list goes on and on and on of yet more highly paid civil servants setting up organisations that will achieve nothing. Until the euro is broken up, until you reverse the social market model you will not help youth unemployment." Continue reading →

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Argentina Applies Law That Jails Hoarders as Bread Price Surges

'Interior Commerce Secretary Guillermo Moreno announced the measure in the official gazette today. The 1974 law allows authorities to freeze prices and obliges companies to maintain supply. Those in breach are subject to fines and imprisonment. 'If the law on supply is applied, the one who should go to jail is Moreno himself,' former Economy Minister Martin Lousteau said in an interview with Radio Mitre today. 'He’s to blame for the lack of wheat in Argentina.' Argentine wheat production has decreased since 2006, when President Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner’s predecessor and late husband Nestor Kirchner set export quotas." Continue reading →

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A Whole Mess From Krugman About Whole Milk and Beyond

"Are slowly climbing milk prices evidence that price inflation is not a threat? Far from it, it is another example of Krugman thinking only one or two steps deep. The fact of the matter is that milk consumption is crashing in America. This change in milk consumption patterns is having the effect that one would expect, falling milk sales. In 2011, total U.S. beverage milk sales were 53 billion pounds - about 6 billion gallons - the lowest level since 1984, according to U.S. Department of Agriculture. Whole milk beverage sales in 2011 were less than half their level from the early 1980s. Got that? Milk sales are crashing, and it is across all age groups." Continue reading →

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Bill Bonner: What I’m Doing With My Money Now

"Family offices have for hundreds of years been protecting and growing family wealth, based on a number of unique long-term investment strategies. They've also been helping families pass on their wealth through the generations. The skills necessary for building wealth – including the habits and the customs that allow you to hold onto it and pass it along to the next generation – can take a long time to accumulate. Why are the Swiss so wealthy, for example, and the Bolivians... or the Zimbabweans... or the Albanians... or the Baltimoreans... so poor? The Swiss have the habit of wealth; the others do not. There are some skills that take more than a generation to acquire." Continue reading →

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German Chancellor Angela Merkel says no country will have to leave eurozone

"Pushing her message of the need for greater fiscal discipline, structural reform and strengthened competitiveness, she said: 'All of us have to jointly become better, and for that we need European unity.' Merkel, who faces elections on September 22 in Europe’s biggest economy, has long championed fiscal discipline that has forced painful spending cuts in countries such as Greece and Spain. More recently she has focussed on the need to help the victims of the crisis, almost six million jobless under-25-year-olds, and repeatedly said that 'Germany will only do well if Europe does well'." Continue reading →

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European Central Bankers Promise Monetary Inflation for Years

"It’s official: the Bank of England and the European Central Bank announced a policy of guaranteed counterfeiting on a permanent basis. They will keep short-term interest rates low for years. They did not say for how many years. The promise of unlimited counterfeiting pushed up European stock markets. This joint announcement makes it clear that Europe’s central banks have no exit policy, any more than the Federal Reserve does. Once a central bank adopts monetary inflation, it cannot stop without creating a recession. Europe’s central bankers have decided that they prefer risking price inflation as opposed to recession." Continue reading →

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58,000 Californians Will Lose Health Care Insurance in 2014.

"Two insurance companies have announced that they will no longer offer health care insurance to individuals in California next year. They will sell policies only to group insurance policies. Obama promised this: 'If you like your health insurance, keep it.' He and Pelosi forget this: 'Of course, your existing company may decide not to sell it to you after we’re finished with the health insurance system.' Nobody says that companies have to sell policies that are money-losers. So, the way for companies to protect themselves against rising claims is to pull out of the market. If other firms think they want the risk, they can keep selling these individual policies." Continue reading →

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Delay in Obamacare requirement puts onus on the honor system

"Delaying the 'employer mandate' already means the government is giving up potential revenue next year, as businesses whose employees buy subsidized coverage on an Obamacare exchange would be fined $3,000 per person. In addition, without the reporting requirements of the employer mandate in 2014, 'the exchanges and the IRS will not be able to verify whether someone’s coverage is unaffordable' and thus whether the person is eligible for subsidies, said law professor Timothy Jost of Washington and Lee School of Law in Lexington, Virginia. That leaves it up to individual consumers to be honest about what they do, or do not, qualify for." Continue reading →

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Why the ‘War on Drugs’ has been made redundant

"Professional but clandestine labs are rifling the scientific literature for new psychoactive drugs and synthesising them as fast as the law changes. Despite the free availability of substances as pleasurable as already banned drugs, we have not seen a massive increase in problem users and drug mortality rates have been falling. Even with the newly introduced 'instant bans', drug laws are simply not able to keep up. It has long been clear that the drug war approach of criminalising possession rather than treating problem drug-users has been futile. The war on drugs has not been lost, it has been made obsolete." Continue reading →

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Something’s not all right with Medicare

"What could possibly be so powerful that it threatens the viability of the largest revamping of health care in half a century? It’s the amount of money Medicare pays doctors for services rendered. Next year the ACA mandates that the reimbursement rate for doctors’ services be cut by 24.7 percent. If that happens without a hitch — without the first Million-Doctor March on Washington or doctors forming a union as tough as the Teamsters — the health-care cost savings envisioned by the ACA may actually come to pass because doctors will either be working for less money from Medicare or they will have said goodbye and good luck to their Medicare patients." Continue reading →

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