I highly encourage you to read the latest interview with Hugo Salinas Price.  Mr Price is a retired billionaire who made his fortune via a chain of appliance stores in Mexico.  He is also a tireless advocate of sound money.  His plan to reintroduce silver as a competing currency in Mexico would make it the most sought after money in the world bar none. It is well worth your time to understand the details of how he proposes to do this.

But what I really want to draw attention to is a point that Mr. Price frequently makes that you very rarely hear anywhere else – the fact that the limitless trade imbalances of the US and its subsequent de-industrialization and loss of quality jobs can be laid at the doorstep of the fiat dollar.  Consider his point:
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The reactions to last week’s hammering of gold and silver further exhibits that we are still in the early stages of a long-term precious metals bull market.  With Tuesday’s huge declines in gold and silver, public sentiment turned bearish almost instantly, which is exactly what the sellers wanted.

In the early stages of a bull market, setbacks produce last week’s results: nearly instant negativity, in some cases panic.  In the latter stages of a bull market, price declines are viewed universally as buying opportunities, which are jumped on with confidence.  In the early stages, setbacks generate concern, cause investors to question the wisdom of their positions.  In the later stages, positions are increased. (more…)

Political pundits remain amazed at 76-year old Ron Paul’s appeal to America’s youth. When he goes to college campuses, students show up in groves. A couple of years ago, his flight from Houston to Phoenix was weather-delayed for hours, but when he arrived at ASU thousands still waited to hear him speak.

At the final GOP presidential debate in Mesa, over a thousand youth, who could not afford to pay to attend the debate, waited at a church for Ron Paul to make a personal appearance. Ron Paul did not disappoint, showing up and delivering a basic talk on liberty, freedom, no wars (unless Congressionally-declared) and a reduction in government spending. The crowd went wild.

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In the GOP presidential debates, when Ron Paul talks about economics he is a giant among pygmies.  None challenge him.  The best his opponents can come up with is to rail about the need to balance the budget.  But, when he brings up the issue of the business cycle, the other candidates look like they want climb under the podium.  Further, no moderator has ever sought to question his economic positions.

Ron Paul’s grasp of economics comes from fifty years of studying economics and reading the best books from the Austrian School of economic theory.  He read Ludwig von Mises, Friedrich A. Hayek, Murray Rothbard, Henry Hazlitt and Hans Sennholz, to name only a few but the most high profile.  Further, he has rubbed shoulders with and discussed economic theory with many these giants of the Austrian School.  Although his formal education is in medicine, Ron Paul also is an economist.
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In 1954, Darrell Huff wrote his classic book How to Lie with Statistics, which covered many popular ways people use and abuse statistics to make them say anything they want.  Well, it appears that our good friends at the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) are no stranger to these techniques.  Last Friday they released their new jobs number that said the employment rate had fallen to 8.3% on a net addition 243,000 new jobs.

While everyone in the mainstream media and the White House were busy celebrating the recovery of the American economy, Zerohedge dug into the numbers over the following days to reveal a much different picture of what was really happening.

The big problem they noticed was: how do you reconcile a reduction in the unemployment number with the fact that the labor force participation rate has been dropping for the last 12 years and is now at the lowest point in 30 years?

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