We are literally in the eye of the reset storm:


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

A Recovery Program for California | Howard Jarvis Taxpayers Association

January 8, 2010 By Jon Coupal For a decade, California state government has spent more than it receives in revenue. The result? Our state has the lowest credit rating of all 50 states, we rank in the top four in unemployment, near the top in tax burden per capita, and we rank last or close to last in a number of surveys that measure business climate. Not coincidentally, California small business bankruptcies are up 81% over last year. For lawmakers, spending is a compulsion. During the historic recall campaign of 2003, Arnold Schwarzenegger, who correctly labeled the spending problem as an addiction, promised he would be the antidote. His pledge to “blow up the boxes” and bring fiscal sanity to Sacramento led voters to support his candidacy by a huge margin. Sadly, and perhaps predictably, the spending terminator quickly succumbed to a more regional strain of the Beltway fog – some have even likened it to the Stockholm Syndrome where, after just a few months in office, elected o...
Read more

United States of America = Banana Republic?

On October 22nd 2009, Sen. Judd Gregg (R-N.H.), ranking Republican on the Senate Budget Committee , says that the U.S. economy faces a future as a “banana republic” if current federal fiscal policies continue. " Congress works for the next election, not for the next generation." In April 2009, Missouri Republican US Senator Kit Bond likened Barack Obama 's administration to a banana republic if they proceed to hold public trials on the issue of torture, giving the term banana republic a bimodal definition in the context of the ongoing US torture investigations. [23] In May 2009, Paul Krugman, columnist for the New York Times , referred to the state government of California as a banana republic. He was commenting on the state's tax system, in which taxes cannot be raised even in an emergency without a two-thirds majority. The state constitution requires that the budget be balanced, denying it the ability to borrow, while gerrymandering has turned many dist...
Read more

FOOD FOR THOUGHT: All That Glitters Might Be Gold

Image
by Charles Maley Although Gold might be a bit stretched in the short term, it is not hard to see where it could go a lot higher in the long run. I found some interesting charts on Agora Financial website that fall into the “a picture is worth a thousand words” category. First, let’s look at the expansion in the monetary base. The monetary base is not only in a vertical ascent, but also without precedence. We have never seen anything like this. The monetary base is essentially the Federal Reserve Bank’s currency and reserves. Now, with an expansion like this you would think inflation would be rearing its ugly head, but as hedge fund manager John Paulson points out “that’s because this base money has not yet been lent out and multiplied throughout the economy. Yet the monetary base and money supply are highly correlated, almost 1-to-1 between the two.” So what does this mean? I think it means that soon or a later the money supply will follow, and if money supply grows faster th...
Read more