People across the globe are losing faith in traditional national currencies. In Europe, this spurred the creation of the Euro and now the popularity of digital currencies such as Bitcoin. In the United States, it is fueling renewed interest in the use of gold or silver coins as currency. The most interesting experiment is going on in Texas, where Governor Rick Perry (who is hardly a libertarian) is pushing an effort to create a Texas Gold Depository. This proposal wouldn’t create a gold currency; instead it would create what amounts to a sort of exchange-traded
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The so-called fiscal crisis in Washington is nothing but politics. Even though Congress and President Obama claim that the country is out of money, politicians on both sides of the aisle seem to be able to come up with money for pet projects. An investigation by Senate Republicans found that the Labor Department had enough funds to spare to promote unions and collective bargaining overseas. Republicans learned that the Department had given $2.2 million to the Solidarity Center (an AFL-CIO organization set up during the Cold War to help workers in Communist countries) to promote
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The media is once against trumpeting real estate and claiming that rising real estate prices are a sign of recovery. Are the commentators correct, or is the so-called increase in real estate prices simply hype designed to make a terrible economy look better? The frightening answer is that the real estate recovery looks like a bubble designed to create an illusion of recovery. Worse, speculators are manipulating it in order to line their own pockets at average people’s expenses again. Is the Real Estate Recovery a Fraud? Some recent news stories indicate that the rise
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The Social Security Trust Fund should be solvent and able to continue to pay all benefits (including cost-of-living adjustments each year), except for the fact that although everyone paid into the trust fund with every paycheck and their employers had to match it, Congress stole, pilfered, plundered, and embezzled it all. The term “trust fund”
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If you’ve been paying a lot of attention to the news lately, you’ve been hearing about something called Bitcoin. For those of you who haven’t heard of it, Bitcoin is supposed to be a digital currency that people can use to protect their wealth against inflation and government seizure. The basic idea is that Bitcoin is an alternative to government-created currencies. Unlike the U.S. dollar or the Euro, Bitcoin is purely electronic; there is no Bitcoin paper. Instead, it exists only in the virtual world; Bitcoin is administered by a private foundation, and it claims
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It is time to start preparing for another major economic catastrophe, and this time it won’t start in America. It’ll come from China; in fact, it’s probably already started. The looming catastrophe is the biggest real estate bubble in human history, and it was ably documented by CBS correspondent Lesley Stahl for a recent 60 Minutes broadcast. Stahl’s report is well done and absolutely frightening. Everybody who cares about his or her economic future needs to see it, and see it now. The highlights of the report are as follows: The so-called Chinese economic miracle
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The United States might be on the verge of another collapse that is potentially more devastating than those in 2007 and 2008. This isn’t the opinion of survivalists, but the opinion of executives at the world’s largest retailer, Walmart. Internal emails leaked to Bloomberg News indicate that some Walmart executives think an economic collapse is under way. In the emails, Walmart’s vice president of finance and logistics, Jerry Murray, called February sales a total disaster and the worst he’s ever seen. Another Walmart vice president, Cameron Geiger, even asked, “Where are all the customers? And
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For the last several weeks, the market has given indications that it was going to take a run at the old 2007 highs of 14,000+, but every time it would get near the target, there would be a several hundred point sell-off, followed by a mediocre up day, and then another several hundred points to the downside the next. So what triggered this final run to the roses that broke through the resistance and then kept going for at least another day, setting an all time record high of 14,296.24 on the DOW and 1541.46
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The answer to the above question is yes, both economists and the media are definitely lying to us about the economy. The recovery they keep promising us has turned out to be limited, and if you live in the real world, nonexistent. The interesting thing is that there are some economists and people in the media that tell the truth. The problem is that we rarely hear what they say; editors and producers cherry-pick the information they put out. That is, they put out the news that people most want to see. There are several
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In his new book Who’s the Fairest of Them All?: The Truth about Opportunity, Taxes, and Wealth in America, Stephen Moore of the Wall Street Journal shows the very rich pay more taxes in the United States than in any other industrialized nation in the world. The very rich are made up of the top 10 percent of taxpayers. According to Moore, that 10 percent pay over 45 percent of the total tax revenue in the U.S. This is in direct contradiction to the liberal notion that top earners in this country do not pay
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