Category Archives: Business

Paul Financial Portfolio

Business, Debt, Economy, Federal Reserve Bank, Ron Paul

OF COURSE RON PAUL IS INTO METAL BIG TIME. Naturally, Austrians in economics will be gold bugs and/or general metalheads.

It should be no surprise that, “Twenty-one percent of [Ron Paul’s] $2.4 to $5.5 million was in real estate, 14 percent in cash. He owns no bonds. Only 0.1 percent is invested in stocks, and Paul bought these ‘short,’ betting the price will plunge. Every other nickel is sunk into gold and silver mining companies.”

“This portfolio,” said [financial analyst William Bernstein], “is a half step away from a cellar-full of canned goods and 9-millimeter rounds.” [Dah!]
“You can say this for Ron Paul,” conceded [the Wall Street Journal]. “In investing as in politics, (Paul) has the courage of his convictions.”

MORE.

UPDATED: Fired Up Over Firing

Business, Capitalism, Economy, Elections, Free Markets, Political Philosophy, Private Property, Reason, Republicans

As I pointed out weeks ago on an RT broadcast, Newt Gingrich attacked Mitt Romney for what are the prerogatives of private property and the fiduciary duty of a CEO managing private property: firing people or evicting them from private property.

Rush Limbaugh doesn’t quite put it in such uncompromising terms, but he points out today what a feat of unparalleled moronity is the specter of “capitalism being attacked by the Republican” presidential front-runners.” “It’s senseless. It doesn’t make any sense,” gushes Rush.

Establishment conservatives only acknowledge reality once their own kind awakens to it, in this instance, Romeny’s vigorous defense of profits was noticed by Rush due to National Review’s Jay Nordlinger, who has rightly derides Mitt Romeny’s anti-capitalism detractors.

“Over and over, Romney defends and explains capitalism. And he’s supposed to be the RINO and squish in the race?” The one guy out there defending capitalism, the one guy out there trying to explain corporate profits to the Occupy crowd, he’s the squish, he’s the moderate, he’s the guy that we have the problem with? “That’s what I read in the conservative blogosphere, every day. What do you have to do to be a ‘real conservative’? Speak bad English and belch?

[Don’t bother to post here in reply if you are unable to separate this episode from the actors you dislike, and are wont to launch into a, “I hate all establishment conservatives, therefore I, lazily, refuse to address anything they say or do, right or wrong, and demand that you, Ilana, appease my idiocy.]

UPDATE: Paul defends Romney ‘fire’ comment and history at Bain. Good for him.

What is interesting is that dumbo Dana Bash—a CNN reporter whose love for Obama is second only to Jessica Yellin’s, another CNN pack animal—spun the Paul response as strategic, rather than principled. She’s not even an “analyst,” for what that title’s worth at CNN, yet she’s parsing a Paul response for markets (a thing she has no grasp of) as a response for politics. Yellin is now, as I write, yelling with excitement because, naming anonymous sources (isn’t that a no-no in Journalism, unless a matter of life-and-death?), she has had confirmation from her Man’s camp (BHO), that Romney has unraveled in the past 48 hours. Weird. Didn’t he just win a New Hampshire Primary?

UPDATED: Tiny Employment Uptick (& Tricky Statistics)

Business, Economy, Labor

According to the government’s say-so, “the economy added 200,000 jobs in December, double November’s pace and all of it coming from the private sector.” Given that “the sectors that added the most jobs was transportation and warehousing” and “courier services such as UPS,” the employment uptick is realistically a “seasonal swing.” Either way, it’s safe to say that if not for the Obama administration’s heavy handed interventions, the growth in private-sector employment would have been greater.

Better news is that “governments have continued to shed workers. Public agencies cut 12,000 workers in December, with most of those cuts at the local level.” This is a drop in the bucket, given the size of the US oink sector, and the degree to which it impinges on the private economy. (By way of an example, here’s an ad for a parasite for hire: and “Invitations Coordinator” paid for by taxpayers.)

In Francis Wilkinson’s optimistic assessment—he’s a member of the Bloomberg View editorial board—“The jobs gap is still 12.1 million jobs. At a rate of 208,000 new jobs per month, it will take slightly more than 12 years to close that gap, according to the Hamilton Project, a public policy group started in 2006 by the Brookings Institution. For the unemployed, the U.S. labor market remains the worst since the Great Depression.”

UPDATE: Tricky Statistical Tactics, via Paul Craig Roberts (and BAB contributor below):

The official unemployment rates (U3 and U6) no longer measure all of the unemployed. The Clinton administration ceased counting as unemployed workers who had given up looking for a job for one year or longer. No discouraged workers are included in the widely reported U3 measure. The U6 measure includes workers who have been discouraged for less than one year.
In other words, the longer an economy is in the doldrums, the less the official unemployment rates are reliable measures of the extent of unemployment. The unemployment rate in December as measured by U3 is 8.5%; as measured by U6 which includes short-term discouraged workers (less than one year) is 15.2%. John Williams’ measure which includes the long-term unemployed is 22.4%.
In other words, the real unemployment rate is 2.6 times the widely reported U3 rate, which is the rate emphasized by policymakers and the financial press.

UPDATED: Importing Monstrous Morals (The Utouchables)

Business, Ethics, Family, Government, IMMIGRATION, Islam, Labor, Media, Multiculturalism, Political Correctness, Pop-Culture, The West

The excerpt is from “Importing Monstrous Morals,” now on WND.COM:

“In its contempt for women, India, our democratic ally, has advanced little since the time it practiced Sati, ‘the custom of burning a widow alive on the funeral pyre of her husband.’

Then, Western values had valiant defenders like General Sir Charles James Napier. When ‘Hindu priests complained to him about the prohibition of Sati by British authorities,’ Napier replied:

“Be it so. This burning of widows is your custom; prepare the funeral pile. But my nation has also a custom. When men burn women alive we hang them, and confiscate all their property. My carpenters shall therefore erect gibbets on which to hang all concerned when the widow is consumed. Let us all act according to national customs.” (Via Wikipedia. )

Nowadays, our ‘national customs’ are exemplified by ‘enlightened’ observers—ABC’s Elizabeth Vargas, for example—who gather and disseminate spotty, decontextualized data, in this case, about “the systematic, widespread elimination of India’s baby girls.” Vargas traveled to India for the current affairs program ’20/20.’

Back in the 1800s, Napier understood “Sati” as a cultural barbarity.

In 2011, Vargas is somewhat vague. Critical faculties dulled by the belief in the equal worth of all cultures and peoples, Vargas failed to firmly finger the sacred cultural cow to which Indians sacrifice a million girls every year. (The Economist is more optimistic, putting the number of girls who go missing as a result of a gender preference for boys at 600,000.)

… poverty and lack of education play almost no role in this morally monstrous practice. …

In utero and outside of it, the elimination of women in India is not about what we here in the US call “reproductive rights.” This is about the right to life. In India, a woman’s life, fetus or fully formed, is worthless.

… Empirical proof of these impregnable positions was provided by the University of California, San Francisco. UCSF conducted a “qualitative study of son preference and fetal sex selection among Indian immigrants in the United States,” showing that “Indian immigrant women are using reproductive technologies and liberal abortion policies in the United States to abort female fetuses.” The study was published in Social Science & Medicine. Therein, the objects of observation are quoted as saying that, “There is such a thing as too many daughters, but not too many sons.”

The complete column is, “Importing Monstrous Morals.” Read it now on WND.COM.

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UPDATE (Dec. 16): Pam Maltzman: About the US getting India’s best and brightest: It’s probably the opposite, as those who come here are likely untouchables fleeing the cast-system in India and seeking a better station in life. It is well known, if not documented—for who would have the courage?—that Indians working in our massive high-tech conglomerates, as I stated in the column, are often very average in technical skills. They do, however, excel in exercising bureaucratic power; are quarrelsome, arrogant, and can talk up a storm. As soon as they are in positions of power, they are in the habit of hiring their own kind, often irrespective of merit, and to the detriment of The Other Kind. Massive companies, flush with billions, work much like government, within which fiefdoms with power structures develop. In these chieftainships, the relationship between productivity and profit is loose, at best. So long as the Chief has a good connection to the next top dog, he can chug along for years, before his little nexus collapses. Looking diverse is one of the main goals of the multinational with billions to blow. If a project collapses with a female at the helm, for example, a lot of musical chairs and cover-up action will ensue, as females are a prized minority too.