On Friday, Treasury Secretary Jacob Lew sent a letter to House Speaker John Boehner, informing him that the Treasury will begin taking “extraordinary measures” in order to keep the Federal debt below the legal limit. Such measures could include redeeming current investments in the retirement accounts of civil service workers and would keep things running
Last week, Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke made a speech in Chicago where he warned that a long period of interest rates could lead to asset price bubbles or speculative lending ending in a new financial crash. Sadly, Bernanke is like a general fighting the last war. He’s worried about another banking crisis, fearful of another
The following is an excellent presentation by Christine Hughes of Otterwood Capital Management on the beginning of the end of the Japanese bond market and how it has negatively impacted gold in the short term. On April 4, 2013 the Bank of Japan announced their “2-2-2-2” policy in which they will attempt to create 2%
The entire purpose of modern economics is to obfuscate the truth; to convince the masses to support policies that are contrary to their own interests. In the early twentieth century, economists in the United States realized the opportunity to transform their lot in life from that of dreary academicians to well paid pseudo-celebrities by becoming
Neil Irwin over at the Washington Post recently set about reminding the unwashed masses that, only the dollar is money, in his piece “Bitcoin is ludicrous, but it tells us something important about the nature of money.” He starts us out with his “givens”. “We can all agree that the dollar bills in my wallet
It’s really quite amazing to see the economic fallacies that are trotted out in support of the central banking/fiat money meme. This recent one attempts to blame rising wealth inequality and economic stagnation on the proliferation of robots in manufacturing and automation in general: The alarm over machines posing a real risk to jobs has
The evidence continues to mount that government spending kills the real economy. In the game of wealth redistribution, every dollar the government takes from the private sector is one less dollar spent by the private sector. For every job that the government creates, a job is lost in the productive economy. At best you could
In case you missed them, there were a couple of stories this week that revealed a great deal about the current state of our economy. The first was from Bloomberg concerning several leaked emails from Walmart executives. According to Jerry Murray, Walmart vice president of finance and logistics: “February MTD sales are a total disaster…
Stanley Druckenmiller is the former manager of Duquesne Capital, one of the most successful hedge funds ever. He recently gave a rare interview with CNBC in which he spoke about entitlement reform and the implications of our unsustainable national debt. Washington DC has a serious spending problem. One that will eventually lead to a dollar
Straight out of the dust bin of failed government policies comes the latest proposal from Obama to raise the minimum wage to $9/hour. Like so many other economic fallacies, at first glance it seems like a good idea — take the lowest group of wage earners and give them a raise. Not only does it