Robert Reich

...  Until His Iron Deficiency Goes Away

All Capitalist Systems Have Some Inequality.  We Don’t Want To Prevent All Inequality … Just Economy-Wrecking Levels

Currency War ... Trade War ... Hot War

The Global Currency War Is Escalating

Presenting Dave Collum's now ubiquitous and all-encompassing annual review of markets and much, much more. From Baptists, Bankers, and Bootleggers to Capitalism, Corporate Debt, Government Corruption, and the Constitution, Dave provides a one-stop-shop summary of everything relevant this year (and how it will affect next year and beyond).

Meet the man, who many say (most of whom correctly) has been running pretty much everything from deep behind the scenes.

It’s easy to be pessimistic over the future prospects of liberty when major industrialized nations around the world are becoming increasingly rife with market intervention, police aggression, and fallacious economic reasoning.  The laissez faire ideal of a society where people should be allowed to flourish without the coercive impositions of the state is all but missing from mainstream debate.  In editorial pages and televised roundtable discussions, a government policy of “hands off” is now an unspeakable option.  It is presumed that lawmakers must step up to “do something” for the good of the people.  Thankfully, this deliberate false choice will slowly but surely bring the death of itself.   Illogical theories can only go on for so long before the push-back becomes too much to handle.  For those who desire liberty, it’s a joy that the statist economic policies of the Keynesians become even more irrational as the Great Recession drags on. The two following examples will illustrate this point.

Those who Benefited from Wall Street Fraud Must be Prosecuted … Including Rogue Government Officials who Aided and Abetted the Crimes

Too Big Leads To Destruction of the Rule of Law

Big Banks Are Rotten to the Core

Forget Competing Theories … What Do the Facts Say about Quantitative Easing?

Are you ready?

Insolvency will keep dragging the Euro-Area economy down until sovereign and bank balance sheets are repaired, but as Lombard Street Research  points out: eliminating the Ponzi debt without fracturing the entire credit system is impossible. The Lehman default occurred 13 months after the US TED spread crossed 100 basis points. The European equivalent crossed 100 basis points in September 2011, so its banking crisis would occur this autumn if a year or so is a normal incubation period. A Greek or any other significant default will precipitate a European banking crisis in the foreseeable future. Markets are already speculating on Portuguese negotiations for haircuts and Ireland can’t be far behind and the contagion to US (and global) banking systems is inevitable given counterparty risks, debt loads (and refi needs), and capital requirements (no matter how well hidden by MtM math). The contagion will likely show up as a risk premium in the credit markets initially as we suggest the recent underperformance of both US and European bank credit relative to stocks is a canary to keep an eye on.

In Washington, Mr. Parasite joins his sociopathic family and lives happily ever after. 

If you really listen to his whining socialist diatribes, Paul Krugman is the enemy of every man and woman who works in the global financial markets. Many of my colleagues on the Street are very liberal, yet Krugman would take all of their money via higher taxes in a nanosecond. How is it that nobody sees that Krugman’s commentaries in The New York Times are almost perfectly predicted by George Orwell in Animal Farm – and Hayek in the The Road to Serfdom?