Archive - Mar 1, 2015 - Story

Somehow, monetary policy is still believed neutral in the long run and that bubbles are market events. Central banks have shown why they cannot command economic performance, but that doesn’t mean they can’t give one hell of a comedic performance. We have taken a monetary ride now into the theater of the absurd.

In case the world needed any more geopolitical risk "hotspots", overnight Venezuela's flailing president Nicolas Maduro, faced with an unprecedented economic crisis at home, decided to do what most authoritarian rulers do when faced with imminent civil unrest: point the finger abroad, and in this case, at Washington, as a distraction. Overnight Maduro switched from broad generalizations to specifics when, as CNN reports, Maduro said Saturday an unspecified number of Americans were arrested "a few days ago" for engaging in espionage and recruitment activities.  Additionally, a group of prominent U.S. officials, current and retired, will be banned from entering Venezuela because of what Maduro said was their involvement in "bombing Iraq, Syria and Vietnam" and other "terrorist" actions. The officials include George W. Bush, former U.S. Vice President Dick Cheney, former CIA Director George Tenet.

As the world contemplates the various 'provocation' scenarios - a Russian act, a CIA act meant to look like a Russian act, or a Russian act meant to look like a CIA act? - the following clip suggests this was anything but an ad hoc shooting... Questions remain, but Soviet ex-President Mikail Gorbachev is sure, the assassination of opposition politician Boris Nemtsov as an attempt to destabilize Russia.

Those of us who are libertarians have a tendency to speak frequently of “the New World Order.” When doing so, we tend to be a bit unclear as to what the New World Order is. Is it a cabal of the heads of the world’s governments, or just the heads of Western governments? Certainly bankers are included somewhere in the mix, but is it just the heads of the Federal Reserve and the IMF, or does it also include the heads of JPMorgan, Goldman Sachs, etc.? And how about the Rothschilds? And the Bundesbank—surely, they’re in there, too?

If there was supposed to be any crackdown on opposition voices in Russia following the shocking death of Boris Nemtsov, it wasn't evident today during a rally in which tens of thousands converged in central Moscow this monring to mourn the veteran liberal politician Boris Nemtsov, whose killing on the streets of the capital has, according to AP, shaken Russia's beleaguered opposition. As AP reports, and as the photos below show, the mourners marched to the bridge near the Kremlin where Nemtsov was gunned down shortly before midnight Friday. "The march could serve to energize the opposition or it could prove to be a brief outpouring of emotions that once again dissipates in a climate of fear."