December 2008
83 posts
Wall Street Journal: The problem with the Fed's... →
“Barely nudging Mr. Madoff out of the top of the news was the Federal Reserve’s announcement last Tuesday that it intends to debase its own paper money. The year just ending has been a time of confusion as much as it has been of loss. But here, at least, was the bright beam of clarity. Specifically, the Fed pledged to print dollars in unlimited volume and to trim its funds rate, if...
Wall Street Journal: Peter Schiff says there's no... →
“The good news is that economics is not all that complicated. The bad news is that our economy is broken and there is nothing the government can do to fix it. However, the free market does have a cure: it’s called a recession, and it’s not fun, easy or quick. But if we put our faith in the power of government to make the pain go away, we will live with the consequences for...
Reuters: Police use excessive force, ER docs say →
“In a survey of a random sample of U.S. emergency physicians, virtually all said they believed that law enforcement officers use excessive force to arrest and detain suspects. The sample included 315 respondents. While 99.8 percent believed excessive force is used, almost as many (97.8 percent) reported that they had managed cases that they suspected or that the patient stated had involved...
Houston: Police get the wrong house in Galveston,... →
From the you-just-can’t-make-this-shit-up dept.
“The habit of intervening to prop up unsound positions and to support particular...”
– Lionel Robbins, The Great Depression (1934)
Wired Magazine: Researchers use PlayStation... →
“A powerful digital certificate that can be used to forge the identity of any website on the internet is in the hands of in international band of security researchers, thanks to a sophisticated attack on the ailing MD5 hash algorithm, a slip-up by Verisign, and about 200 PlayStation 3s.”
ScienceDaily: Genes that made 1918 flu lethal... →
“By mixing and matching a contemporary flu virus with the ‘Spanish flu’ — a virus that killed between 20 and 50 million people 90 years ago in history’s most devastating outbreak of infectious disease — researchers have identified a set of three genes that helped underpin the extraordinary virulence of the 1918 virus.”
Stefan Karlsson: Obama economic plan explained →
aka Abbott & Costello meet the economic stimulus.
Market Skeptics: China makes the renminbi an... →
Nice timing announcing this on Christmas Eve. It is just about the biggest news of the year in terms of its future implications.
Foreign Affairs: After the crash →
“It is the bad luck of the next president to be moving into the White House just as the monetary orthodoxy of the post-1971 era is coming in for a long-overdue reappraisal. But at the same time, it is his good fortune to have the opportunity to put the dollar on a sounder basis. Indeed, it is his duty. The world’s reserve-currency franchise is a U.S. national treasure. To begin to...
Stefan Karlsson: Solving the "problem" of... →
“If the government truly believed that deflation was a big problem, it is in fact easily solved [if you just] legalize counterfeiting! This should first of all create a lot of jobs in the printing press manufacturing industry [and it] really differs nothing from the regular process of inflation, except in the sense that we here have regular counterfeiters that benefit instead of the...
Ron Paul: Government and Fraud →
“Bernie Madoff’s self-described Ponzi scheme […] collapsed dramatically when too many clients called in their accounts, and not enough new victims could be found to support these withdrawals. […] The government itself runs a fraud much bigger than Madoff’s. Our Social Security system is the very definition of a Ponzi, or pyramid scheme.”
MSNBC: European court makes ruling on DNA rights →
One minor step back from the creeping police state: “Europe’s top human rights court Thursday struck down a British law that allows the government to store DNA and fingerprints from people with no criminal record — a landmark decision that could force Britain to destroy nearly 1 million samples on its database.”
The Earth Times: Protesting Icelanders storm... →
“What began Monday as a celebration of Iceland’s 90th birthday since its independence from Denmark in 1918 turned into protests by several hundred people who stormed to the central bank in anger over the government’s handling of the financial crisis. […] The Icelandic krone has lost three-quarters of its value over 12 months. Iceland is in for a tough year in 2009 as the...
Scotsman: A near-riot and parliament besieged -... →
This still sounds like the typical Nordic-style civilized protest, so I wouldn’t call this “boiling mad” just yet. After all, as currency crashes go, it’s a comparatively soft landing when coffee is up only a third. But it’s still early on, and certainly a sign of things to come. Unemployment at 25% and triple-priced coffee, and we’ll be talking about a real...
ZWNews: Everything's in short supply but hope →
“A guy goes shopping with a wheelbarrow full of Zimbabwe dollars. On the way to the shop, he is mugged – the muggers overturn the barrow, tip out the cash and make off with the wheelbarrow.” [This is from 2003; the situation has since got much worse.]
New York Times: Obama administration to expand... →
Because it worked so well the last time around™. This administration looks set to be predictable as clockwork for anyone with a history book.
Lee Iacocca: Where have all the leaders gone? →
Now that’s a rant worthy of the name.
Peter Schiff: In Madoff we trust →
“A [Ponzi scheme] is no more viable when run by governments than when run by private citizens. However, government orchestrated pyramids have the advantage of required participation. As a result, they can maintain the illusion of viability for several generations. But the longer such schemes operate the larger will be the losses when they ultimately collapse.”
Stefan Karlsson: Can media lies prevent an... →
“The Russian economy has been hit hard by the dramatic decline in the price of oil, its by far most important exports. The ruble has therefore fallen significantly and the stock market is down 75%. Yet as the universally state-controlled medias have banned the use of words like ‘crisis’ and ‘decline’ with regard to the Russian economy, it continues to say that the...
Newsweek: Denis MacShane on European anti-Semitism →
“As Europe faces up to its old demons of financial breakdown and job losses, a wind from the past is blowing through the continent. The politics of moderate center-right and left-liberal democracy that took power after 1945 are giving way to a new old populism. The extravagant rhetoric of the demagogic left and right is gaining ground, and the most obvious manifestation is the return of...
Peter Schiff: A nightmare before Christmas →
“Last weekend Barack Obama announced his intention to implement a New Deal-style stimulus and public works program. What he somehow forgot to mention is that the United States is wholly dependent on the willingness of foreign creditors to supply the funds.”
Seeking Alpha: Fed to issue debt AND print money? →
“I’m still shaking my head trying to make sense of this. The source of all money in the United States, the printing press itself, is going to issue debt? […] Well, just when you thought the extent of the doublespeak pervading modern economics had reached a peak! This new issuance of paper, not only backed by nothing, but twice nothing, will elbow its way into the already fetid...
Naked Capitalism: New York Times story pulls... →
Executive summary: state-sanctioned limited liability + state-sponsored monopoly over the issuance of fiat money + state-subsidized socialization of losses = the best gravy train evah!
Reuters: Obama stimulus could reach $1 trillion... →
Anyone surprised by this, or who thinks this is actually going to do any good, had better read Economics in One Lesson… and review America’s Great Depression (the first one, that is) while you’re at it, so that you have the proper feeling of déjà vu going forward from here.
Stefan Karlsson: The coming return of inflation →
“We are now likely starting to see the beginning of the end of this brief deflationary period. […] The monetary base is up 49.2% during this 8 week period, which in case you’re wondering translates into an annual rate of 1246%. Bernanke hasn’t just brought out the helicopters, he has brought out the B-2 bombers too, so to speak.”
AP: Estonia to vote by mobile phone in 2011 →
“Parliament has approved a law making Estonia the first country to allow voting by mobile phone. Lawmakers approved a measure Thursday allowing citizens to vote by mobile phone in the next parliamentary elections in 2011 [which is expected] to be the first of its kind, though neighboring Finland and Sweden possess the software and technical capabilities to conduct a similar ‘cellular...
Bloomberg: Fed refuses to disclose recipients of... →
“The Federal Reserve refused a request by Bloomberg News to disclose the recipients of more than $2 trillion of emergency loans from U.S. taxpayers and the assets the central bank is accepting as collateral. Bloomberg filed suit Nov. 7 under the U.S. Freedom of Information Act requesting details about the terms of 11 Fed lending programs […] The Fed responded Dec. 8, saying it’s...
Bloomberg: Georgia, Texas banks shut as... →
As Jim Sinclair quipped: 25 down, 2075+ to go.
Reuters: Jim Rogers calls most big U.S. banks... →
“What is outrageous economically and is outrageous morally is that normally in times like this, people who are competent and who saw it coming and who kept their powder dry go and take over the assets from the incompetent. What’s happening this time is that the government is taking the assets from the competent people and giving them to the incompetent people and saying, now you can...
FT Alphaville: The unthinkable has happened →
“Just two weeks after Deutsche Bank issued a note discussing the possibility of Japan-style quantitative easing in the US, it’s happening. DB’s previous note was titled ‘The unthinkable.’ This one is ‘Losing control of monetary policy.’”
New Scientist: Mind-reading proof of concept now a... →
“Pictures you are observing can now be recreated with software that uses nothing but scans of your brain. It is the first ‘mind reading’ technology to create such images from scratch, rather than picking them out from a pool of possible images.”
New Scientist: Archimedes and the 2000-year-old... →
Historical detective work is finally throwing some light on the Antikythera mechanism, potentially linking its origins back to Syracuse and Archimedes.
New York Times: Gene mutation is tied to fast fat... →
As soon as retrovirals move from the lab to the garage, I’m splicing myself some apoC-III.