President Obama said the sequester cuts would be "catastrophic".
Reader Tim Wallace pinged me with a few comments to help put those catastrophic cuts in perspective.
Tim asks: If you were making $50,000 per year in 2007 and you income went up to $70,000 (a 40% increase in six years), would a $1,750 pay cut to $68,250 be catastrophic?
Apparently it would be for the Obama administration... read more
All the sordid and spellbinding rackets working their hoodoo on the financial scene have obscured a whole other dimension of the fiasco that America finds itself in, namely the way we have arranged the logistics of everyday life on our landscape: the tragedy of suburbia.
I call it a tragedy because it represents a sequence of extremely unfortunate choices made by our society over several... read more
Central banks are manipulating the price of gold to blunt the impact of their wanton economic policies, according to asset manager Eric Sprott.
Sprott, founder of both Sprott Asset Management and Canada’s large bullion holder, Sprott Money, acknowledged it may sound like a conspiracy theory. But he believes government intervention is the only logical reason gold prices are not higher.
â... read more
"The historical behavior of interest rates and growth rates in U.S. data suggests that the government can, with a high probability, run temporary budget deficits and then roll over the resulting government debt forever.
The purpose of this paper is to document this finding and to examine its implications. Using a standard overlapping-generations model of capital accumulation, we show th... read more
Mexico to audit its gold holdings at the Bank of England ... The Mexican Government Audit Office has issued an official statement, criticizing the Bank of Mexico for not auditing the gold it has supposedly bought and stored at the Bank of England. The auditors ask the Central Bank of Mexico to "make a physical inspection with the counterparty that has the gold under its custody, in order to... read more
South Korea joined Russia and Kazakhstan in boosting gold holdings, even as the metal had its worst start to a year since 1991 and billionaire investor George Soros cut his stake in the biggest bullion exchange-traded fund.
The Bank of Korea added 20 metric tons in February, raising its gold reserves by 24 percent to 104.4 tons, it said in a statement today. Holdings rose about $1.03 billion... read more
For those who, like Time magazine and its exhaustive treatise on soaring healthcare costs, are shocked and confused how it is possible that prices for some of the most rudimentary staples, among them basic medical care and college tuition, have exploded we have the answer. In fact, we had the answer in August 2012, when we showed our "Chart Of The Day: From Pervasive Cheap Credit To Hyperinflat... read more
About a year ago we warned that in a world devoid of bond vigilantes, long emasculated by the Fed's relentless attempt to bring inflation back or go bust trying, the only forces left willing to stand up to Bernanke are the Brent Vigilantes TM, who succeed in crushing every recent reflation attempt whenever Brent reaches $130 or above (and US gas at the pump rises above $3.80) yet which are rath... read more
Clowns to the left; Jokers to the right.
Here we are; stuck in the middle. We play to win and win we shall but sometimes I look at it all and shake my head. The deceit of manufactured debt to GDP ratios in Europe, the complete deception of America’s CPI numbers and the political lies bandied about daily like they were some form of truth when they don’t even mirr... read more
"In numerous years following the [civil] war, the Federal Government ran a heavy surplus. [But] it could not pay off its debt, retire its securities, because to do so meant there would be no bonds to back the national bank notes. To pay off the debt was to destroy the money supply."
- John Kenneth Galbraith
In the investing world, you can take a 3 month view, a 3 year view or a 3... read more
