On January 22nd 2015 the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists updated the Doomsday Clock, moving it up three minutes to 11:57PM — three minutes from Armageddon — accompanied by the following statement: “Unchecked climate change, global nuclear weapons modernizations, and outsized nuclear weapons arsenals pose extraordinary and undeniable threats to the continued existence of humanity, […]
One of the big issues for conservatives in recent years has been the size of government, at least when Democrats are in power. Grover Norquist summed it up in his stated desire to “shrink government to the size where we can drown it in the bathtub.” Conservatives are not entirely wrong in their concern with […]
It has been a long time since America has had leadership that puts nation before partisanship. Perhaps we have forgotten what that looks like. This quarter’s letter features the January 17, Farewell Address of Dwight Eisenhower. I would like to draw attention to Eisenhower’s emphasis on the need for balance in national affairs. Balance – […]
Karl Marx got some things right. “History repeats itself: first as tragedy, then as farce.” The spectacle emanating from Washington in recent months is nothing if not a farce. Republican neo-Confederate nihilists pushed the limit over the debt limit in October, causing a 16 day shutdown of government services and threatening to drive the U.S. […]
The revelation that the U.S. government is vacuuming up, storing and data mining virtually all communications of U.S. citizens is probably not a huge surprise to anyone who has been paying attention to policy trends since 9/11. Just the same, Edward Snowden has done the country a great service by sparking a public discussion of […]
Global central banks have been flooding the world with liquidity in an attempt to fend off debt deflation and re-inflate the global economy…a collective action that is creating the Mother of All Bubbles. On the macro level we are presently experiencing deflationary pressure due to continuing fallout from 2008, and government attempts to reign in […]
The marathon 2012 presidential election campaign is almost finished. Polling has been volatile, but at press time with just a few days to go, Nate Silver’s FiveThirtyEight blog gives Obama an 84% probability of electoral college victory. Intrade has Obama at 67%. This campaign gets the prize for banality. With almost $6 billion spent on […]
The topic of this quarter’s letter is gold. Is it a “barbarous relic” or the only true currency? Should everyone own some, or is it a useless asset? Few issues in the financial world provoke as much passionate and opposing commentary as the role and value of gold. Gold has rallied over 700% from its […]
I have been writing about the inevitable consequences of our fiscal and political insanity since 2001, when those inevitable consequences were almost universally ignored. Since then, much of what I warned about has come to pass, the balance is looming on the horizon, and it has become de rigueur to be pessimistic about the future […]
The reality of the economic catastrophe that has been created by 30 years of debt creation, laissez-faire globalization and upward redistribution of wealth, is gradually and steadily asserting itself. Our leaders have been doing everything they can think of to first deny, and then delay, delay, delay the inevitable, but big changes are beginning to […]