Does California Need Rain, Rationing, or Prices? California is in the midst of a crisis. Its gorgeous weather has turned against it as its fourth year of drought drags on. Looming water shortages are leading to calls for rationing and restrictions on water use. The state has one year of water left, and 35-year megadroughts... (more)
Related: For First Time In History, California Governor Orders Mandatory Water Cuts Amid "Unprecedented, Dangerous Situation"
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Access to Health Care Unchanged after Obamacare's First YearThe Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has released early estimates of health insurance and access to health care for January through September 2014. The National Health Insurance Survey (NHIS) is the most effective survey of health insurance, because it asks people three different but important questions: Are they uninsured at the time of the survey? Have they been uninsured for at least part of the year? Have they been... (more)
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Our Current Illusion of Prosperity| President Obama and Fed Chair Janet Yellen have been crowing about improving economic conditions in the US. Unemployment is down to 5.5 percent and growth in 2014 hit 2.2 percent. Journalists and economists point to this improvement as proof that quantitative easing was effective. Pile on More DebtUnfortunately, this latest boom is artificial and has been built by adding debt on top of debt. Total household debt increased 2.5 pe ... (more)
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The Stock Market In 2015 Is Starting To Look Remarkably Similar To The Stock Market In 2008Are we watching a replay of the last financial crisis? Over the past six months, the price of oil has collapsed, the U.S. dollar has soared, and a whole bunch of other patterns that we witnessed just before the stock market crash of 2008 are repeating onc... (more)
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Eric Holder Issues New Asset Forfeiture Restrictions for Structuring Offenses Today Attorney General Eric Holder issued new guidelines to federal prosecutors tightening the rules for seizing assets for so-called "structuring" offenses.
Under the Bank Secrecy Act, structuring occurs when someone is suspected of arranging their financial transactions as to avoid triggering a report to the federal government by the financ... (more)
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Payday Loans: Leave this Industry Alone"Bunch of do gooders shutting down the last chance these people had."
This sentence is a rare moment of truth concerning the coming regulation (or shutdown) or the payday loan industry. It appeared in the comment box on the New York Times story. Otherwise, most comments were out for blood. Regulate them! Limit interest! Make them all suffer ... (more)
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Give'em the Old Razzle DazzleJanet Yellen channels Billy Flynn? Last week the Fed Chairwoman treated us to a master class of rhetorical misdirection which produced some memorable examples of doublespeak, including the soon to be classic "Just because we removed the word 'patient' does not mean we're going to be 'impatient."' But perhaps more surprising than her new heights of verbal dexterity was the market's euphoria at being so blatantly manipulated. Never has the ... (more)
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"BitLicense" FoolishnessWhen New York’s Superintendent of Financial Services first encountered Bitcoin, he evidently thought it was a way to build his reputation as a hangin' superintendent of financial services. (Doesn’t quite roll off the tongue like "hangin' judge," does it…) He sent subpoenas to everyone in the Bitcoin world and went on TV talking about "narcoterrorists." That was foolishness.
Unfortunately, he also hatch... (more)
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The Costs and Benefits of EthanolHere’s a back-of-the-envelope calculation on how much the mandate to require ethanol in motor fuel costs consumers, and benefits farmers.
This article notes that in 2000 about 5% of the corn crop went to the production of ethanol, and by 2013, 40% of the corn crop was devoted to ethanol production. The increased demand for corn resulted in a doubling of the pe... (more)
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Bureaucracy UnlimitedBig Gov and Big Biz. Are they holding hands, shaking hands, or boxing? It depends on the day and the issue. But while Big Biz hardly seems like a sympathetic character, Big Gov always has the upper hand.
Remember Arthur Anderson? Perhaps not. It used to be the biggest accounting firm around. Then the Justice Department went after it with little proof but lots of gusto. The megalith firm fought the law, and the law won (temporarily). The Department of Justice obtained a criminal co... (more)
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Who Will Regulate the Bank Regulators? A fascinating report by Finn Poschmann from the C.D. Howe Institute discusses the history of bank regulation in the U.S., Canada, and U.K. It explains the movement away from shareholder liability in banks, towards the current system where taxpayers are ultimately on the hook for a bank’s solvency. This leads to a situation of “moral hazard”... (more)
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New Report Shows How Western-Imposed Prohibition Policies Hurt Poor CountriesWealthy Western countries are undermining good governance and social and economic development in poor, drug-producing countries by pressuring them to enforce prohibitionist policies that exploit peasant farmers and waste millions of dollars a year on failed crop eradication and drug interdiction programs. That's the conclusion of a recent report by the British advocacy group Health Poverty Action (HPA). ... (more)
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Venezuela To Start Fingerprinting Supermarket ShoppersBack in August, when we wrote about the latest instance of trouble in Maduro’s socialist paradise, we cautioned that as a result of the economic collapse in the Latin American nation (and this was even... (more)
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Nearly At 'Full Employment'? 10 Reasons Why The Unemployment Numbers Are A Massive LieOn Friday, we learned that the official “unemployment rate” has fallen to 5.5 percent. Since an unemployment rate of 5 percent is considered to be “full employment” by many economists, many in the mainstream media took this as a sign that the U.S. economy has almost fully “recovered” since the last recession. In fact, according to the Wall Street Journal, some Federal Reserve officials believe that “the U.S. economy is already at full employment&ldq... (more)
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Why It Matters If the Dollar Is the Reserve CurrencyWe refer to the dollar as a “reserve currency” when referring to its use by other countries when settling their international trade accounts. For example, if Canada buys goods from China, China may prefer to be paid in US dollars rather than Canadian dollars. The US dollar is the more “marketable” money internationally, meaning that most countries will accept it in payment, so China can use its dollars to buy goods from other countries, not solely the US. Such might not b... (more)
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Lord Rothschild Warns Investors of 'Most Dangerous Geopolitical Situation Since WWII'Lord Jacob Rothschild has warned investors that the world is mired in the most dangerous geopolitical situation since World War II.
The 78-year-old chairman of RIT Capital Partners, a £2.3bn trust, used the organization’s annual report to caution savers that the focus of the firm would be the preservation of shareholders’ capital and not short term gains.
Rothschild said that “a geopolitical situation perhaps as dangerous as any we have faced... (more)
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My Libertarian Vacation Nightmare: How Ayn Rand, Ron Paul & Their Groupies Were All DebunkedHere's some other libertarian havens that prove libertards wrong: North Korea, Cuba, and Venezuela. Oh yeah, I almost forgot the late Soviet Union!
Honduras is a statist hellhole, that the leaders of the country want more money and therefor favor a few select "libertarian" policies (just as happened with Pinochet in Chile) doesn't change the entire framework of a society. - Chris |
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