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Latest Articles: Economy
America Must Secede - Untangling America from the American Empire
Post Date: 2015-10-31 17:48:22 by Hondo68
2 Comments
Those calling for an end of the Empire don't seem to realize that the federal state's vast entitlement programs are ultimately funded by the Empire. The Status Quo would have us believe that America and its Empire are one entity. This is handy for those with Imperial designs but it is false: America could be untangled from its Empire, and many of us believe it is essential that America untangles itself from its Imperial structures and ideologies. What I call The Imperial Project was cobbled together in the aftermath of World War II, when the Soviet Union and America posed an existential threat to each other's ideologies and systems. It may be hard to believe, but the U.S. did ...
Bernie Sanders's Highly Sensible Plan to Turn Post Offices Into Banks
Post Date: 2015-10-20 16:57:45 by Willie Green
4 Comments
They're much less crazy than payday-lending services, and the rest of the world agrees. In an interview with Fusion’s Felix Salmon the day after last week’s Democratic debate and published Tuesday, Senator Bernie Sanders discussed the marquee features of democratic socialism he’s been tirelessly calling for during his presidential campaign: higher taxes for the wealthiest Americans, an increased minimum wage, and breaking up the biggest Wall Street banks.Salmon also raised a possibility that has not been as prominent in Sanders’s stump speeches, but animates him nonetheless: turning the U.S.’s post offices into banks. Sanders: If you are a low-income person, it ...
Why Free Markets Make Fools of Us
Post Date: 2015-10-19 09:08:55 by Willie Green
23 Comments
Phishing for Phools: The Economics of Manipulation and Deception by George A. Akerlof and Robert J. Shiller Princeton University Press, 272 pp., $24.95 Very few economists foresaw the great recession of 2008–2009. Why not? Economists have long assumed that human beings are “rational,” but behavioral findings about human fallibility have put a lot of pressure on that assumption. People tend to be overconfident; they display unrealistic optimism; they often deal poorly with risks; they neglect the long term (“present bias”); and they dislike losses a lot more than they like equivalent gains (“loss aversion”). And until recent years, most economists have not ...
Stephen Hawking Says We Should Really Be Scared Of Capitalism, Not Robots [Full Thread]
Post Date: 2015-10-09 04:41:39 by Willie Green
47 Comments
"If machines produce everything we need, the outcome will depend on how things are distributed." Machines won't bring about the economic robot apocalypse -- but greedy humans will, according to physicist Stephen Hawking. In a Reddit Ask Me Anything session on Thursday, the scientist predicted that economic inequality will skyrocket as more jobs become automated and the rich owners of machines refuse to share their fast-proliferating wealth. If machines produce everything we need, the outcome will depend on how things are distributed. Everyone can enjoy a life of luxurious leisure if the machine-produced wealth is shared, or most people can end up miserably poor ...
Most Americans have less than $1,000 in savings
Post Date: 2015-10-07 16:47:24 by Willie Green
20 Comments
And over 20% don’t even have a savings account Americans are living right on the edge — at least when it comes to financial planning. Approximately 62% of Americans have less than $1,000 in their savings accounts and 21% don’t even have a savings account, according to a new survey of more than 5,000 adults conducted this month by Google Consumer Survey for personal finance website GOBankingRates.com. “It’s worrisome that such a large percentage of Americans have so little set aside in a savings account,” says Cameron Huddleston, a personal finance analyst for the site. “They likely don’t have cash reserves to cover an emergency and will have to rely ...
Bernie Sanders Explains Social Security
Post Date: 2015-10-06 12:10:51 by Willie Green
23 Comments
Marijuana Falls From Sky, Crushes Doghouse
Post Date: 2015-09-28 13:04:15 by Hondo68
5 Comments
Bundle that hit carport probably fell from plane (Newser) – Maya Donnelly awoke to what sounded like thunder in the early morning hours, but she dismissed it as a typical monsoon storm and went back to sleep. Later that morning, she looked in the carport at her home in Nogales, Ariz., near the border with Mexico, and saw pieces of wood on the ground. She found a bulky bundle wrapped in black plastic. Inside were roughly 26 pounds of marijuana—a package that authorities say was worth $10,000 and likely dropped there accidentally by a drug smuggler's aircraft. "It's all right on top of our dog's house," Donnelly says of the Sept. 8 incident. "It just made ...
What's wrong with Fed Chief Janet Yellen?
Post Date: 2015-09-27 19:45:10 by Operation 40
4 Comments
Fed Chairwoman Janet Yellen stumbled over her words toward the end of a nearly hourlong speech at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst on Thursday. Ms. Yellen was seen by EMT staff on-site and later resumed her schedule. Published on Sep 24, 2015 Money for Nothing - Inside the Federal Reserve Money for Nothing: Inside the Federal Reserve is an independent feature-length American documentary about the Federal Reserve written and directed by Jim Bruce, and narrated by Liev Schreiber. It examines 100 years of the Federal Reserve's history, and discusses its actions and repercussions the US economy leading to the late-2000s financial crisis. Bruce believes "a more fully and ...
Trump says high CEO pay is a joke, 'disgraceful'
Post Date: 2015-09-13 15:47:55 by rlk
5 Comments
AOL Trump says high CEO pay is a joke, 'disgraceful' WASHINGTON (Reuters) -- Republican presidential frontrunner Donald Trump on Sunday blasted the high salaries of chief executives as a joke and a disgrace and said these were often approved by company boards stacked with the CEO's friends. Trump, a real estate mogul who has said he plans to use his net worth of $8.7 billion to fund his White House campaign, said in an interview with CBS' "Face the Nation" that it was hard to tackle the question of corporate pay. "It's disgraceful, sometimes the boards rule but I would probably say it's less than 10 percent, and you see these guys making enormous ...
Why (Any) Economics Matters
Post Date: 2015-09-05 23:21:22 by Hondo68
1 Comments
First let me say that what we today call “Austrian economics” flows from the great legacy of classical economics, with the very important modification economists now call the “marginal revolution.” Austrian economics is also a term that describes a healthy and vibrant (though often oppositional) modern school of economic thought. It originated with intellectual giants like Carl Menger and Ludwig von Mises, names I’m sure many of you are familiar with. These economists were from Austria, hence the term.There was a landmark conference at South Royalton, Vermont in 1974, attended by the likes of Murray Rothbard and Milton ...
On a plate [Full Thread]
Post Date: 2015-08-30 17:43:00 by A Pole
41 Comments
Donald Trump’s Plan for Your Taxes Might Be EXACTLY What He Needs to Win the White House
Post Date: 2015-08-11 12:01:16 by nativist nationalist
6 Comments
The liberal media has been going absolutely berserk over Donald Trump’s remarks on immigration. However, they are ignoring his stances on other issues, some of which are very insightful. In his book, “Time to Get Tough: Making America #1 Again,” published in 2011, Donald Trump laid out a plan to transform America’s tax code, and it is beautiful. Trump’s code, which he calls the “1-5-10-15 income tax plan,” is a simplistic way to fix our nation’s broken taxation system, without putting the strain on any particular group of people. Under Trump’s tax plan, those making up to… $30,000 per year will pay 1 percent in federal income taxes $30,00 ...
The Kansas Experiment
Post Date: 2015-08-06 10:33:01 by Willie Green
32 Comments
My uncle Gene is a state legislator in Topeka. This year, he and his fellow Republicans tried to do something pretty drastic with the state budget. And I got to watch the whole thing. When I think of my uncle Gene, I think of a man who, late into the night at a particularly boisterous family wedding, would flatten his palms against the dance floor, extend his body parallel to the ground and then begin to undulate his legs and torso in a move known as the worm. Or I think of how, even later that same evening, he would agitate for a midnight meal at a diner in west Wichita, Kan., called the Golden Bell. Or of how, in his more abstemious workaday life, he left the family business — a ...
A Brief History of Interest [Full Thread]
Post Date: 2015-07-15 13:02:57 by Pericles
102 Comments
A Brief History of Interest On December 18, 2010, in Research & Articles, by AMI This essay was originally created for the Swiss Money Museum Web site (www.moneymuseum.org/) in mid 1999. It appears here thanks to the gracious permission of Dr. Jurg Conzett, creator of the Money Museum Web site. Updated and adjusted materials taking continuing research on this subject into account are found in The Lost Science of Money book, published four years after this piece (see link below). by Stephen Zarlenga copyright 2000, AMI 1)Early Loans And Interest Were Based On Agricultural Produce From about 30,000 BC human existence became more refined until social and economic forms of ...
Inflation of basic income items
Post Date: 2015-07-14 18:31:03 by TheFireBert
5 Comments
"Whenever we talk about anything involving a basic income -- whether today's concepts of minimum-wage jobs and welfare, or tomorrow's concepts of the gig economy and guaranteed minimum income -- we're also talking about what people REALLY NEED to just be living decently in the world. Turns out that the things that make old people crazy on Fox News -- welfare recipients have cable TV and buy fancy clothes [and Obama-phones (TFB)]! -- are far cheaper than they used to be, and therefore are rational decisions for the poor. The problem is that the truly important investments of life -- health, education, nutrition -- have become more expensive." Click for Full Text!
If The Cost Of Money Is a Fake Price
Post Date: 2015-07-10 23:59:48 by nativist nationalist
0 Comments
Then the price of every other asset is also a fake price -- Commentator on CNBC just now. Of course you think this is great right now with the DOW up 200+ points, right? Oh, the truth keeps coming: -- "all that is happening is pulling forward activity and encourages excessive leverage." (gee, who's said that for the last 8 years?) He also just brought up the damage pension funds take in their laddered portfolios. Peter...... oh my...... Update: Watch the segment here...
Trading resumes on NYSE after 'technical' issue hits Big Board
Post Date: 2015-07-08 17:16:00 by Hondo68
0 Comments
A flag flies on outside of the New York Stock Exchange building in New York in this May 6, 2010 file photo. REUTERS/Lucas Jackson/Files Trading resumed on the New York Stock Exchange Wednesday afternoon after an internal technical hiccup sparked a halt that lasted more than three-and-a-half hours.A bulletin to traders said the relatively small NYSE MKT opened at 3:05 p.m. ET, while the larger NYSE opened at 3:10 p.m. ET.NYSE spokesperson Marissa Arnold declined to offer specifics on the root of the issue, except to say it's "technical" in nature. However, a NYSE status bulletin indicated trading across NYSE and NYSE MKT was halted on all symbols at 11:32 a.m. ET. NYSE's ...
Lincoln's Tariff War
Post Date: 2015-06-27 13:48:58 by lana
1 Comments
Lincoln's Tariff War When Charles Adams published his book For Good and Evil, a world history of taxation, the most controversial chapter by far was the one on whether or not tariffs caused the American War between the States. That chapter generated so much discussion and debate that Adams's publisher urged him to turn it into an entire book, which he did, in the form of When in the Course of Human Events: Arguing the Case for Southern Secession. Many of the reviewers of this second book, so confident were they that slavery was the one and only possible reason for both Abraham Lincoln’s election to the presidency and the war itself, excoriated Adams for his analysis that the ...
Greece is a sideshow. The eurozone has failed, and Germans are its victims too
Post Date: 2015-06-23 03:22:53 by A Pole
10 Comments
Nearly every discussion of the Greek fiasco is based on a morality play. Call it Naughty Greece versus Noble Europe. Those troublesome Greeks never belonged in the euro, runs this story. Once inside, they got themselves into a big fat mess – and now it’s up to Europe to sort it all out. Those are the basics all Wise Folk agree on. Then those on the right go on to say feckless Greece must either accept Europe’s deal or get out of the single currency. Or if more liberal, they hem and haw, cough and splutter, before calling for Europe to show a little more charity to its southern basketcase. Whatever their solution, the Wise Folk agree on the problem: it’s not Brussels ...
90 Days: Treasury Says Debt Has Been Frozen at $18,112,975,000,000
Post Date: 2015-06-17 15:40:40 by lana
1 Comments
90 Days: Treasury Says Debt Has Been Frozen at $18,112,975,000,000 (CNSNews.com) - The portion of the federal debt that is subject to a legal limit set by Congress closed Thursday, June 11, at $18,112,975,000,000, according to the latest Daily Treasury Statement, which was published at 4:00 p.m. on Friday. That, according to the Treasury's statements, makes 90 straight days the debt subject to the limit has been frozen at $18,112,975,000,000. $18,112,975,000,000 is about $25 million below the current legal debt limit of $18,113,000,080,959.35. The Daily Treasury Statement for March 13 was the first to show the federal debt subject to the limit closing the day at $18,112,975,000,000. ...
Jim Jordan Puts GOP Leadership on Notice [opposition to Boehner on TPA/TAA]
Post Date: 2015-06-17 12:59:53 by Tooconservative
3 Comments
When a group of House conservatives voted last week to kill a trade bill favored by President Obama, House Speaker John Boehner and other GOP leaders who support the measure steamed. Representative Mick Mulvaney (R., S.C.) celebrated the revolt as a coming-of-age moment for rebel backbenchers. “Yesterday will be the day that we look back at as the day that conservatives finally started getting organized in the House,” he wrote in a note to the Spartanburg Tea Party. Led by Representative Jim Jordan (R., Ohio), a platoon of conservatives demanded that Boehner agree to a series of concessions in exchange for their support for so-called Trade Promotion Authority (TPA), legislation ...
House GOP poised to pursue fast-track without aid for workers [TPA without TAA]
Post Date: 2015-06-17 09:09:45 by Tooconservative
0 Comments
Dropping Trade Adjustment Assistance risks losing Democratic support for the larger trade deal. The House is on the brink of scheduling a standalone vote on giving President Barack Obama fast-track trade authority without accompanying worker assistance legislation, according to multiple sources familiar with the plan. The House could vote on Trade Promotion Authority as early as this week, the sources said. The House Rules Committee, which sets parameters for the consideration of legislation, meets late Tuesday afternoon. A final decision has not been made, and top Congressional aides are in negotiations to chart a course forward. Boehner was set to meet with pro-trade Democrats at 3 p.m. ...
Pension tidal wave is about to crash down on taxpayers
Post Date: 2015-06-16 12:40:45 by Tooconservative
29 Comments
The New Jersey legislature, looking to solve a budget crisis back in 1992, passed a bill that changed some of the accounting principles of the state's government employee pension system. The technical changes, little understood at the time, made the system seem in better financial shape than it actually was, allowing the legislature to reduce contributions for pensions by $1.5 billion over the next two years. Legislators seized those extra dollars and redirected them into other spending. Jersey officials could manipulate their pension system because local governments have latitude in how they run their own retirement plans. So what they did was not unique. Around the country, state and ...
Writing's On The Wall: Texas Pulls $1 Billion In Gold From NY Fed, Makes It "Non-Confiscatable" (Texas Bullion Depository)
Post Date: 2015-06-15 22:45:20 by Hondo68
4 Comments
The lack of faith in central bank trustworthiness is spreading. First Germany, then Holland, and Austria, and now - as we noted was possible previously - Texas has enacted a Bill to repatriate $1 billion of gold from The NY Fed's vaults to a newly established state gold bullion depository..."People have this image of Texas as big and powerful … so for a lot of people, this is exactly where they would want to go with their gold," and the Bill includes a section to prevent forced seizure from the Federal Government. From 2011: "The University of Texas Investment Management Co., the second-largest U.S. academic endowment, took delivery of almost $1 billion in gold ...
Obama’s trade plan in critical condition ["Pacific Union" on life support]
Post Date: 2015-06-15 21:15:07 by Tooconservative
2 Comments
Congressional leaders and the White House are quickly finding there’s no easy option to revive President Barack Obama’s free trade initiative, leaving the White House’s top legislative priority in critical condition after Democrats turned against it in droves last week. Millions of dollars and countless hours have been spent trying to pass Trade Promotion Authority, a key component in Obama’s quest to strike a trade deal with 11 other Pacific Rim countries. But Congress is now hung up on Trade Adjustment Assistance, a job training and aid program that typically rides alongside trade deals. One hundred and forty-four Democrats abandoned Obama on the TAA bill, which ...
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