regeya

Is There Really a Global 'Cabal' Aiming to Dump the Dollar?

'This uk "cabal" article must have some credibility or gold and silver wouldn't be rising as much today.'

post hoc ergo propter hoc

How PHEVs and EVs Will Sabotage America's Drive for Energy Independence

Largely based on specious logic. The assumption seems to be that a pure EV only saves an amount of gasoline equivalent to the energy expended by the car, while for the hybrids, the savings is somehow, illogically, higher.

Or, put another way, it's a bit bizarre that you've managed to "prove" that a pure EV saves less gasoline than a hybrid--bizarre because the pure EV uses ZERO GALLONS.

Dollar's Days of Dominance Are Over

All the discussion of China...*sigh* People like to scream and yell about government intervention in the West but overlook that, unlike the 21st Century Red Scare we have here in the United States, China really IS a socialist regime. Further, if you learn to read between the lines and know where to look, they're facing resource scarcity in fuel, energy, facing mammoth environmental problems, water shortages, and have officially reported thousands of incidences of civil unrest, stemming from such practices as, say, creative rulemaking which tends to excuse the state from paying workers. This doesn't even get into the unofficial rumors of the sheer number of banks which have been bailed out by the central bank, to cover up massive corruption.

Plus, that massive wealth was built on the foreign currency so many people say China stands to collapse.

What do I fear? The collapse of China. Just watch and wait.

Economies Improve in Three States - How Can We Copy Them?

"A $100,000 house in Peoria, Illinois will pay around $2,000/yr in property taxes whereas the same tax bill in Tacoma, Washington will be on a $225-250,000 house! In Arkansas, its more like $200 for the $100,000 house!"

There are parts of downstate Illinois where your property tax will be on par with what you pay in Arkansas. Sadly, my county is not one of them. However, on the plus side, where I live you won't lose a subcompact in a pothole, which I can't say for the lower property tax counties/townships ;-)

'Bailouts' Are Misunderstood

"Cost to whom?"

Cost to shareholders who lose their investment, cost to "consumers" in the form of lost jobs, cost to retail when "consumers" no longer have jobs...

This isn't rocket science. When big companies fail, there's a domino effect.

What If We'd Been on the Gold Standard?

I went searching for dissenting opinion on gold, and found this.

Yeah, there's a lot of craziness on both sides.

I saw someone, and I think it was on mises.org, who suggested that we deal with the finite nature of gold by making it worth more.

So, bear with me a moment.

I think it's important to have quality controls on the money supply. Call me crazy, but I don't think anarcho-libertarianism can ever work, so let's just assume we use an institution already in place. The U.S. Mint could start pressing gold dollars, five dollar coins, etc. They would all be a uniform weight, size, etc. to make sure everyone knows at a glance what they're being handed, and blind people could handle their own money they way they handle coins now.

So. Let's say we've decided to re-peg the value of gold, because we're going through a period of stagnation right after a population explosion (it could happen.) That, or we go through a massive Midwestern drought and the value of food skyrockets due to scarcity. Either we just let people die, or we re-peg.

Okay. Let's say we re-peg. We've determined the coins should always be a consistent size, shape, and so on. Right?

So, we start cutting the gold in the dollars with lead...

Hail Caesar.

On Jul 1, 7:29 PM Ames Tiedeman wrote:

> If we stayed on the Gold Standard then the DOW would still be under
> 1,000 and the average home would be $45,000.00, and America would
> be much, much poorer.
> There would be no capital to finance anything. We went off the Gold
> Standard when we ran out of Gold. There was not enough Gold to back
> the number of dollars the economy could absorb to raise the living
> standard and to economically grow.

The Dummy's Guide to the U.S. Financial Crisis

"As a long-time Republican I am embarassed for my party and its long history of fiscal discipline and social conservatism"

which ended in 1980, when Reagan proceeded to triple the national debt.

or maybe earlier than that, since the dollar came unhinged from anything sensible during the Nixon administration.

Eh, there's enough blame to go around. Neocons, Republicans, I'm even betting there's a couple of Communists and Libertarians we could throw into the mix if we tried hard enough.

What the President Didn't Say

'America spent the last 15 years building ever bigger, ever grander McMansions and vacation condos - all paid for with less and less down payment on the back of over-stated incomes and "wink-wink" loan underwriting. The wolf was kept from the door with ultra low interest rates and exotic mortgages (2/28's, negative amortization, interest only, etc.).'

The blame goes to people buying far too expensive homes, the Federal reserve, the Federal government...almost no one blames bankers and other businessmen who were all-too-willing participants in this mess.

If it weren't for the loan officer forging documents, 30k-income folks would never have gotten loans for million dollar homes. If it hadn't been for willing banks, contractors would never have gotten loans for half-million-plus "spec" homes. If it hadn't been...bah.

I guess what I'm getting at is that everywhere I look, people want to put the blame on everyone EXCEPT the people who could have prevented this in the first place. We want to claim the banks couldn't make money any other way, but that's not true, now is it? Certainly there were other money-making opportunities, surer things, but they went for the riskier options, driven by greed.

Plenty of blame to go around, and I'm not sure why most people want to leave the entities who gave out loans out of this.

Current Market Turmoil: You Can’t Explain 'Stupid'

Ponzi Scheme, feel free to send as much of your worthless paper to me as possible!

Honestly, is it just me or do the von Mises followers sound like anti-Marxists?

Fannie & Freddie Bailout? - Fast Money Recap (9/5/08)

"Understand that government bailouts and welfare state policies give more and more power to the federal government."

They could always claim that it stamps out terrorism. Everyone, especially Republicans, knows it's okay to expand the federal government's powers as long as it stamps out terrorism or otherwise expands our military and/or police-state powers.

Oil: The Inconvenient Truth

"longoil: exactly. however, as i opined in the article, i am not so sure the price drop can be blamed on slack US demand as rising consumption in china, russia, india, and the middle east is sucking it up."

Shucks, the extremely publicly available numbers show that, percentage wise, U.S. demand is dropping slowly, while demand in the rest of the world is growing rapidly. However, in real, hard numbers--not percentages--our paltry drop this year WIPED OUT the demand increases from the rest of the world FOR THE PAST TWO YEARS.

I'd point you in the right direction, but heck, you're the one who should have done the homework before you wrote this column, not me.

Where Does Oil Go from Here?

ozzy43, damn near every government on Earth is in debt. The notion that the U.S. is screwed because the debt has reached 60% US GDP is laughable, especially when you compare that level of debt to the rest of the world.

Also, if you ask the people of the Austrian persuasion what's going to happen to the United States, who would care if China hd 2 QUADRILLION in US Treasuries? Worthless paper. So's the yuan. So's the euro. So's many other forms of currency.

We're all screwed, unless we stop listening to those who want to destroy the world economy for some strange reason.

Worst June Since 1930?

ArtfulDodger: 'Dumborats,' cute. I'd be interested to know what your view is of the last 30 years, given that Federal spending has dropped during Democratic Presidents' time in office, but balloons when those fiscally responsible, small-government Republicans are in power.

Both sides vote for pork. Both sides are just playing the regular politics. The Dumborats and Republitards are leading us down the path of ruin. If any of them had a bit of sense, we'd get back to working together as a nation. But since we've had our run of New McCarthyism, I doubt we'll get back together until after the collapse.

When Crude Drops, AMR Will Fly

"And to Sliman, can China grow forever. They are already beginning measures to slow down their economy, raising interest rates and increasing bank reserve ratios."

Not to mention that both their and India's GDP may be overstated by as much as 40% apiece...