Tag Archives: Debt and the Fallacies of Paper Money

  Long Term Seasonal Price Trends Prices in financial and commodity markets are exhibiting seasonal trends. This applies to the precious metals gold, silver, platinum and palladium as well. Platinum Crystal, image via shapeways.com - Click to enlarge The chart below depicts the seasonal trends of the gold price over a time period of 45 years. Gold prices typically experience a seasonal rally in the second half of the...

Surface Temperatures Plunge – the Great Pause Continues Last year’s El Nino phenomenon temporarily provided succor to climate alarmists, who were increasingly bothered by the “Great Pause” – the fact that the tiny amount of warming experienced since the last cooling cycle ended in the late 1970s had apparently stopped. Despite trace amounts of CO2 in the atmosphere continuing to climb, mother nature decided to disobey...

Surface Temperatures Plunge – the Great Pause Continues Last year’s El Nino phenomenon temporarily provided succor to climate alarmists, who were increasingly bothered by the “Great Pause” – the fact that the tiny amount of warming experienced since the last cooling cycle ended in the late 1970s had apparently stopped. Despite trace amounts of CO2 in the atmosphere continuing to climb, mother nature decided to disobey...

Surface Temperatures Plunge – the Great Pause Continues Last year’s El Nino phenomenon temporarily provided succor to climate alarmists, who were increasingly bothered by the “Great Pause” – the fact that the tiny amount of warming experienced since the last cooling cycle ended in the late 1970s had apparently stopped. Despite trace amounts of CO2 in the atmosphere continuing to climb, mother nature decided to disobey...

  Too Smart to Think These days everything must be smart.  There are smart cities, smart grids, smart policies, smart TVs, smart cars, smart phones, smart watches, smart shoes, and smart glasses.  There’s even something called smart underwear. Before long everything around us will be so smart we’ll no longer have to do one critically important thing.  We’ll no longer have to think; smart algorithms will think for us. ...

  Too Smart to Think These days everything must be smart.  There are smart cities, smart grids, smart policies, smart TVs, smart cars, smart phones, smart watches, smart shoes, and smart glasses.  There’s even something called smart underwear. Before long everything around us will be so smart we’ll no longer have to do one critically important thing.  We’ll no longer have to think; smart algorithms will think for us. ...

A Very Odd Growth Spurt in the True Money Supply The growth rates of various “Austrian” measures of the US money supply (such as TMS-2 and money AMS) have accelerated significantly in recent months.  That is quite surprising, as the Fed hasn’t been engaged in QE for quite some time and year-on-year growth in commercial bank credit has actually slowed down rather than accelerating of late. The only exception to this is...

Bad Monday Some Monday mornings are better than others.  Others are worse than some.  For one Amazon employee, this past Monday morning was particularly bad. No doubt, the poor fellow would have been better off he’d called in sick to work.  Such a simple decision would have saved him from extreme agony.  But, unfortunately, he showed up at Amazon’s Seattle headquarters and put on a public and painful display of...

  A Brutal Communist Dictator Shuffles Off This Mortal Coil The death of the brutal Cuban Communist dictator Fidel Castro closes the door, in some respect, on another disastrous page in US foreign policy history.  For all the denunciations and criticism of Castro from conservative elements and exiled Cubans, his despotic rule was the outcome of decades of American imperialism which began with President William...

Myths and Legends “Myths and legends die hard in America,” remarked Hunter S. Thompson in The Great Shark Hunt, nearly 40-years ago. Uncompromising independence, rugged individualism, and unbounded personal freedom were once ideals essential to the American character. According to popular American folklore, they still are. We have some reservations. In practice, the principles that gave rise to the great myths and...