For those who did not catch wind of it, the Peterson Foundation, which has long had Social Security and Medicare in its crosshairs, held a bizarre set of 19 faux town hall meetings over the previous weekend to scare participants into compliance and then collect the resulting distorted survey data, presumably to use in a […]
Read more...Andy Grove, who lead Intel to dominance of an extremely competitive, risky industry, has a very important opinion piece at Bloomberg (several readers pointed to it, including John M, dr, Crocodile Chuck). He makes a series of points that are the polar opposite of the de facto US industrial policy, of the naive view that […]
Read more...This blog warned a few weeks ago of a coming campaign by the officialdom against so-called “strategic defaulters”. It has arrived even sooner than we expected. We warned that this development was the inevitable result of financial firms, taking an increasingly predatory posture toward their customers. Borrowers are responding in kind, by taking a cold-blooded […]
Read more...Gulf resident and fisherman’s wife Kindra Arnesen took advantage of the offer extended to her to visit cleanup sites and staff meetings: At any rate, I was invited the following week to go behind “enemy lines.” They gave me, of all people, security clearance to go into the base of operations meetings in Venice, Louisiana […]
Read more...By Gonzalo Lira, a novelist and filmmaker (and economist) currently living in Chile and writing at Gonzalo Lira On the occasion of the BP oil spill disaster, President Obama’s delivered an Oval Office speech last night—a masterpiece of milquetoast faux-outrage. The speech was all about “clean energy” and “ending our dependence on fossil fuels”. Faced […]
Read more...The New York Times reports on a monster find of minerals in Afghanistan, some of them strategic (hat tip reader Francois T): The United States has discovered nearly $1 trillion in untapped mineral deposits in Afghanistan, far beyond any previously known reserves and enough to fundamentally alter the Afghan economy and perhaps the Afghan war […]
Read more...By Bob Goodwin, an investor and medical device entrepreneur who lives in Mercer Island, Washington Ideological groupings of the population are an interesting phenomenon. I believe they are caused by two human traits. People need a mental construct or shortcut to make sense of complex externalities, and likely overuse these constructs. More importantly people are […]
Read more...A good Washington DC contact told me that a public relations/media push to demonize those who decide to walk away from mortgages they can still afford to pay (aka “strategic defaulters”) is underway. Expect to see a good bit of moral fervor as those who choose to cut their losses are attacked as immoral, irresponsible, […]
Read more...A fresh Gallup poll reports that Americans are most worried about….federal debts (hat tip Marshall Auerback via the Atlantic): Gallup also provided a tally of how members of each party view the issue: It would appear the ground has been laid rather effectively for (among other things) an assault on Social Security and Medicare. As […]
Read more...By a retired physician who worked several years in the medical communications and pharmaceutical industry who writes as Francois T Is the federal government really ready to punish those responsible of corporate malfeasance in the pharmaceutical industry? Push hard enough and you are bound to get a push back, even from a slow, at times […]
Read more...An important little post by Amanda Reed at WorldChanging reveals how conventional measures of carbon emissions give consumers a free pass and ignore the greenhouse gas production resulting from global sourcing of consumer goods. John Barnett of the Stockholm Environment Institute gave a presentation based on his work in the UK and 40 local governments […]
Read more...If you think America is a nation of laws, remember that some people think laws exist merely to be circumvented. One example that has remained below the radar is creditors seizing Social Security and other public benefits which by law are beyond their reach. The peculiar, and permitted abuse is that banks are not required […]
Read more...Brad DeLong points out that Ronald Reagan was far more concerned about unemployment than Team Obama (or Washington generally) is, and also took far more aggressive measures to combat it. From The Week (hat tip reader Marshall): By the start of 1983, labor unions were frantically giving back previously-promised wage increases and offering wage cuts […]
Read more...By Bob Goodwin, a medical device entrepreneur Yves here. Bob’s post highlights a shift in attitudes that is entirely logical and is the inevitable result of financial firms, taking an increasingly predatory posture toward their customers. Borrowers are responding in kind, by taking a cold-blooded and legalistic look at their agreements with lenders. Banks may […]
Read more...As previous posts on this blog have discussed, trying simultaneously to shrink total private sector debt levels and government debt levels at the same time, absent very aggressive currency depreciation or other measures to increase net exports, is likely to result in a fall in GDP and deflation. Ironically, that means overly aggressive measures to […]
Read more...