After Jared Loughner opened fire on group of people in an Arizona grocery store early last year, apparently targeting Congreswoman Gabrielle Giffords, I wrote a post called "The Lunatic is in my Head". It questioned the mainstream narrative that we were fed about Loughner being a paranoid schizophrenic who had simply gone untreated for too long, and suddenly snapped. Let me be clear – in my opinion, whether Loughner was a "lunatic" or not is irrelevant to whether he should
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Most people would have noticed how ZeroHedge, perhaps the most popular financial blog, has done a 180 degree reversal on the prospects for imminent quantitative easing by the Fed, as well as other important central banks. And if you hadn’t noticed the reversal, then you will after reading this. Most of last year and the first few months of this year, the writers/editors there had been heavily biased towards the Fed announcing a bold new QE program at almost every
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Harris & Ewing Hot Air 1938 "Goodyear Blimp at Washington Air Post, Washington, D.C." Jeff Rubin, former chief economist with Canadian bank CIBC, is very well known for his predictions of exponentially increasing oil prices (see for instance this 2009 lecture). Mr Rubin’s position was that prices would continue their rise due to a confluence of circumstances – that conventional supplies have peaked, that unconventional sources are expensive to produce and that demand would continue to grow with the energy
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The world is waiting for more of those cryptic messages from the head of the Fed, who today listens to the name Ben Bernanke and speaks on Capitol Hill. Today may not be an FOMC announcement occasion, but there's still the eternal hope that Ben will give a sign, even though it will undoubtedly be excruciatingly small and ambiguous, that more free public money is on the way for the financial system. There's a nice report out on how and
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I’m always surprised by the common argument that central authorities will “not allow defaults to occur”, as if a) they have a clear-cut choice in the matter and b) those defaults haven’t ALREADY occurred. Obviously, this threat is the most acute at the so-called “sovereign” level in the Eurozone, in which countries are inextricably wedded to each other in unholy monetary matrimony. Greece has already defaulted on its obligations to private creditors, while the so-called “autonomous” regions of Spain are
Read More...Have I ever told you much I despise the use of labels? Perhaps you’ve noticed by my sometimes frequent use of quotation marks around nouns that I can’t otherwise avoid using in a description or explanation. In the field of economics and finance alone, you have your “Keynesians”, “Austrians”, “Monetarists”, “Marxists”, “Neoclassicals”, “Inflationists”, “Deflationists”, “soft money advocates”, “hard money advocates”, “capitalists”, “communists”, “anarchists”, etc. When we expand the fields to encompass sociology, psychology, politics and religion… forget about it. The
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May 1936. “Bank that failed. Kansas.” Medium-format nitrate negative by Arthur Rothstein for the Resettlement Administration. It seems to have been at least a month or two since the last time TAE ticked off more than a few gold bugs with an article, and that’s much too long if you ask me! My aim here, of course, is not really to tick anyone off, although that may very well be the result, but to present some balanced information about where
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Ilargi: I recently picked a comment out of the TAE comments section and turned it into an article , because it struck me as something more people should read than just those that read that section (everyone should, of course, but some are slow to catch on…). That article was our friend Skip's Cuckoo in the Coal Mine. In a somewhat Escherian chain of events, there was another comment to that article that caught my eye just like Skip's had
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This is number ten in a series of articles documenting the principles and practice of eco-thrifty renovation written by Estwing of the ETR Blog for the Wanganui Chronicle. Last week I wrote about foam window and door seal, and home-made draft-blockers. Did anyone install either of these? If so, please write a letter to the Chronicle and share your experience. Here is a short story to motivate you: Last Friday night I went fishing with my mate. When I got
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Adolphe-Alexandre Dillens – Capture of Joan of Arc The yields on Spanish and Italian 10 year bonds have been falling lately, though not by much (Update: they're rising again already, even with a "good“ Italian auction). Why? Mainly because the Eurozone promised to ship €30 billion to Spain's banks. And partly because Spain got another year's time to comply with EU budget demands. And also partly because Spain announced its (hard to keep count) fourth – restructured – austerity package
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