ETC

Whether a job requires intense effort and a specialized skill or just having a human brain, market prices are the only way to match people that want to do the job with the people that want the job done. Even $0/hour is sometimes voluntarily chosen by a worker who simply wants to help a certain cause. Mandated minimum wages eliminate these kinds of peaceful and productive arrangements, leaving both parties unsatisfied and society worse off.

The U.S. is, in fact, Europe’s enemy - not merely Russia’s enemy. Not merely the truth’s enemy. Not merely democracy’s enemy.

All great monetary fiascos are forged upon a foundation of misperceptions and flawed premises. There’s always an underlying disturbance in money and credit masked by supposed new understandings, technologies, capabilities and superior financial apparatus. The notion back in 2006 and 2007 that the world was at the brink of a major crisis was considered absolute wackoism. Incredibly – and well worth contemplating these days - virtually no one saw the deep structural impairment associated with the protracted Bubble in “Wall Street Finance.” An even more momentous monetary fiasco has been perpetrated since the 2008 crisis, constructed upon a foundation of even more outlandish misperceptions and flawed premises.

Swap spreads recently took a nosedive and are once again trading at negative levels, even for shorter maturities. This market perversion suggest that Wall Street is a safer counterpart than the very institution that underwrites the whole fractional reserve fraud in the first place. To price in a higher risk premium on the US government than on US banks is a contradiction in terms so there need to be another explanation behind this puzzling market phenomenon... There is, and you're not going to like it.

Many campus activists have lashed out in frustration at “free speech purism,” which they regard as misplaced in the context of institutionalized oppression. But it is extremely short-sighted to sacrifice universal principle on the altar of identity politics for the sake of marginalized groups.

"If you just exclude all the bad stuff, earnings look quite good."

One more time: It’s not Paris, Greece, China, Ebola, Fed rate-hike or not, etc... Nothing matters but OPEX...

Just a day after a dismal read on GDP, the latest data out of Brazil shows a spike in both inflation and unemployment, as the country's economic outlook continues to deteriorate at an alarming pace.

Today’s financial world is a tough place for the average person but paradise for rich guys. As easy money raises asset prices, the owners of those assets make effortless profits. Then they buy expensive toys and trophy properties. Hence the recent boom in fine art, high-end real estate, yachts and private jets. But like all financial trends, this one has a limit, and that limit is now in sight. The 1%, it seems, is rolling over...

Central planners around the world are waging a War on Cash because, as Ron Paul so eloquently put it "the cashless society is the [government]’s dream: total knowledge of, and control over, the finances of every single [citizen]." It is perhaps ironic then that Sweden, which became the first country in Europe to issue paper money in 1661, is probably going to be the first in the world to entirely eliminate it.

Bombing wont stop them; it will just make more of them. Ironically, what can stop them is the Assad government and the ground forces of its Hezbollah and the Iranian Republican Guard allies. Its time to let them settle an ancient quarrel that has never been any of America’s business anyway. But Imperial Washington is so caught up in its myths, lies and hegemonic stupidity that it can not see the obvious. And that is why a quarter century after the cold war ended peace still hasn’t been given a chance and the reason that horrific events like last week’s barbarism in Paris still keep happening.

This is the REAL picture of the global economy. It isn’t what CNBC and the talking heads tell you. It is economic collapse.

The current world-system (call it whatever you like--cartel-crony neoliberal-state capitalism, etc.) is as doomed as the Titanic, for the same reasons: the design of the system is the source of its failure.

Hard left authoritarians at Amherst College have issued a series of demands, under the threat of civil disobedience, that include the complete end of free speech on campus as well as extensive re-education for offenders. There is simply no middle ground here. You are either an outright fascist who wants to institute a kind of leftist thought police on college campuses or you are fighting against this.