In April it was announced that Greece was imposing a surcharge for all cash withdrawals from bank accounts to deter citizens from clearing out their accounts. So now the Greeks will have to pay one euro per 1,000 euros that they withdraw, which is one-tenth of a percent. It doesn’t seem very big, but the principle at work is extremely big because what they’re in effect doing is breaking the exchange rate between a unit of bank deposits and a unit of currency.
What we have seen over the course of the last eighty years is a systematic dismantling of the contribution of economics to our understanding of the social world. Whatever the cause, modern economics is now not much more than formal modeling using mathematics dressed up in economics-sounding lingo. In this sense, economics is dead as a science, assuming it was ever alive. Economics in mathematical form cannot fulfill its promises and nei... (more)
More than 2,000 years before America's bailouts and entitlement programs, the ancient Romans experimented with similar schemes. The Roman government rescued failing institutions, canceled personal debts, and spent huge sums on welfare programs. The result wasn't pretty.
Roman politicians picked winners and losers, generally favoring the politically well connected -- a practice that's central to the welfare state of modern times, too. As numerous writers have noted, these expensiv... (more)
China’s recent move to devalue the yuan has sent shock waves through the global financial markets and has convinced most observers that a new front in the global currency wars has begun. The move has caused many observes to envision a new round of competitive devaluations around the globe in which the race to the bottom will intensify. In this scenario they envision that the U.S. dollar will solidify its standing as the only strong currency. This misses the point entirely.
Did you see what just happened? The devaluation of the yuan by China triggered the largest one day drop for that currency in the modern era. This caused other global currencies to crash relative to the U.S. dollar, the price of oil hit a six year low, and stock markets all over the world were rattled. The Dow fell 212 points on Tuesday, and Apple stock plummeted another 5 percent. As we hurtle toward the absolutely critical months of September and October, the unravel... (more)
Dan Price, the CEO of Gravity Payments, took a $930,000 pay cut to raise the minimum salary of his employees to $70,000. The plan was announced in April 2015, and set to be completed over the course of three years. Both his employees (especially the ones with a larger pay increase) and proponents of income equality celebrated the move. It garnered considerable publicity and rippled through social media, with mostly positive but some negative reactions.
Over the past few years observing changes in Federal Reserve interest rate policy has been a little like watching paint dry or grass grow...only not as exciting. That's because the Fed has not changed its benchmark Fed Funds rate since 2008 (Federal Reserve, FOMC). So with nothing else to talk about, Fed observers have focused on the minute changes in language that are included in Fed Policy statements. The minuscule revision in the July statement was the inclusion of the word "additional" to th... (more)
Frontrunner Donald Trump's plan to radically reduce income taxes will bolster his popularity with the American people.
In his book, "Time to Get Tough: Making America #1 Again," published in 2011, and updated for the 2016 campaign, Trump put forward a plan to transform the government's expropriation of income and wealth.
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That’s right: the Federal Reserve is now in the business of enforcing the U.S. government’s drug laws, even if that means making a mockery of both state governments' right to set their own drug policies and the Fed’s own governing statutes.
The Fed’s involvement in drug prohibition became official last month, when the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City informed Denver’s Fourth Corner Credit Union -- a non-profit cooperative formed by Colorado&rsquo... (more)
Is the United States economy recovering - or are we being lied to by the mainstream establishment? Why has Gold recently hit a five year low despite long term predictions of it's rise in value? Are the government statistics on inflation accurate? What does the future hold for the US Dollar? Why has the Dollar strengthened and how will this play out in the long... (more)
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