Category Archives: Federal Reserve Bank

Cryptocurrency’s Max Keiser Vs. Gold’s Peter Schiff

Argument, Debt, Democrats, Donald Trump, Economy, Federal Reserve Bank, Foreign Policy, Republicans, Russia

I’ve never known what to make of the financial expert RT has stuck by, Max Keiser of the eponymous Keiser Report.

I had been more of a Peter Schiff gold devotee. Thing is, the devotion was not returned. Most of Schiff’s clients, especially the small fry, fared poorly over time and seldom or never heard from the money maestro (who himself is very wealthy; broker fees and all).

Schiff is still calling “Bitcoin the latest iteration of fool’s gold and anybody buying it [the] ultimate fool.” Keiser, the choice on the business page of RT (Russia Today), is a Bitcoin guy. Bitcoin is holding the value of assets and then some. Gold? It has been fractionalized (spelling?)—fractional reserve banking has bad connotations!—and manipulated by the brokerages.

Speaking of RT (which once published this writer’s weekly column): Republicans, like the Democrats, speak of that TV station as an arm of the Kremlin (presumably nothing like CNN or MSNBC or WaPo which are never an arm of the Democratic Party).

In truth, Trump conservatives never defended President Trump’s conciliatory position toward Russia and Vladimir Putin. Rather, Republican defense of Trump’s correct stance toward Russia consisted of bolstering his alleged anti-Putin credentials, and boasting that he was ACTUALLY tougher on Russia than the Dems. So weak. So dumb.

It’s never about principled argument with Republicans. In their narrow little minds, the American Empire is supposed to war with Russia. That Trump came to power opposing that position was no reason to reexamine their asinine assumptions.

Since they invariably always fall in-line with neocon and neoliberal foreign-policy orthodoxy—Republicans and conservatives only ever tried to nudge Donald Trump toward America’s wrongheaded, Russia monomania.

*Image courtesy of RT.

UPDATE II (6/10): NEW COLUMN: Looting Is Local — Courtesy Of Leroy & Lakisha

Crime, Criminal Injustice, Ethics, Federal Reserve Bank

“The statistical relationship between race and crime, however, is as strong as the relationship between Officer Derek Chauvin’s knee and the late George Floyd’s neck.”—ILANA MERCER

NEW COLUMN, “Looting Is Local — Courtesy Of Leroy & Lakisha,” is now on American Greatness. It first appeared on WND.COM and The Unz Review.

An excerpt:

Dr. Michael Baden had determined that George Floyd died by cop. This the courageous onlookers who captured the snuff film could have told him.

The nation’s foremost forensic pathologist was called in to weigh-in, scientifically and independently, about the demise of the Minneapolis man, who millions across the world have, by now, watched slowly suffocate to death on camera, on May 25.

“Look at him. Get off him now. What is wrong with y’all. Leave him. You’re killing him. Bro, he’s not moving. Check his pulse.” At this point in the video, blood is bubbling out of his mouth. These good Samaritans loudly protested this police porn. There was a trickle on the asphalt, as Floyd likely lost control over bodily functions, near the end.

Baden, who confirmed mechanical asphyxiation due to pressure on the neck and back, was asked to perform an independent autopsy because the initial, official one was comical, suggesting the cops’ actions were secondary complicating factors.

The Hennepin County medical examiner made it sound like George Floyd should have been able to endure eight minutes and 46 seconds with a knee on his neck and three Minneapolis police officers pushing down on his diaphragm, subsequently reducing blood flow to the brain. Floyd failed their “fitness” test because he was on drugs, drunk, COVID-positive, and in really bad physical shape.

I’d hate to have my physical fitness and sobriety tested that way.

The reality is that millions around the world witnessed George Floyd expire on camera because he was made to star in his own State-sanctioned snuff film.

Floyd’s death was a case of, “Who are you going to believe, me or your own lyin’ eyes?” Which is the colloquial used when one is staring at an immutable reality, yet choosing to see an alternate universe.

The world saw that Mr. Floyd was not in the throes of death until that knee appeared on his neck and those hands pressed down on his diaphragm. Put it this way: correlation in not causation, but it was not a complete mystery when eight minutes and 46 seconds into the boot-and-back treatment the man dies.

The nonviolent offense for which Floyd was tackled and terminated was paying for cigarettes with an alleged counterfeit bill. It’s entirely possible he was guilty of using counterfeit money. It’s also possible he didn’t know the bill was fake given how many hands paper money passes through. If it was this kind of a misunderstanding, it could happen to anyone.

Uncle Sam—who has its proverbial boot on the American taxpayer’s neck—counterfeits trillions with impunity. The Federal Reserve Bank and all the other banks are forever injecting funny money into credit markets. With government imprimatur, the banking system known as fractional reserve banking is engaged in counterfeiting, when inflating the money supply and issuing paper notes not backed by real assets. The central bank’s phony money creation is counterfeiting by any other name, except that it’s legal—because perpetrated by the State.

Next, they’ll tell us that, just as the State can forge and devalue the coin, so it can also kill us with impunity. That’s what the four brazen cops were broadcasting—that murder under the “color of law” wasn’t quite murder.

Another of our deformed society’s Big Lies kicked in when, like locusts, rioters and looters descended on America’s cities—from Minneapolis to Miami, from Los Angles to Louisville.

The specter of looting and rioting is another case of, “Who are you going to believe, me or your own lyin’ eyes?”

Fake Newsers, Fox News Included, then began energetically, sans evidence—other than some bricks in a trash can—to promote a fake conspiratorial narrative:

Looters were never local, but always mysterious outside agitators; well-organized “Antifa.” The fiction was promoted as enthusiastically by Fox News as it was by CNN and MSNB.

Anything to avoid the reality of crime, while signaling your own virtue. …

… READ THE REST. NEW COLUMN, “Looting Is Local — Courtesy Of Leroy & Lakisha,” is now on American Greatness.

UPDATE I (6/7): Thanks, Julie Ponzi, for your instincts as an editor. Once again, I am proven right, in my latest column, at American Greatness regarding looting being an entirely local affair. Analysis of arrest records. Via AP: “more than 85% of those arrested by police were local residents, not outsiders” (but the amount of berating received for refusing to buy into the mythical, erroneous group-think …) :

READ: “Looting Is Local — Not Imported.”

READ: “As Trump blames antifa, protest records show scant evidence.”

UPDATE II (6/10): It’s all local agitation.

The data

Between when the protests in Seattle began Friday until early on the morning of June 1, Seattle police made 82 protest-related arrests, according to data provided by the department. Most of the arrests were for burglary or assault on an officer, with several people picked up for not dispersing when ordered to.

Sixty-two of those arrests listed a location for the person’s residence. Just two were from outside of Washington — California and Oregon — while the rest were from Washington. Fifty-four of those arrested were from Western Washington; 42 lived in King County; and 23 were from Seattle.

It’s unclear how those numbers compare with the protesters who were not arrested. It would be impossible to take a census of the thousands who marched through downtown Seattle, the Capitol Hill neighborhood and onto Interstate 5.

POLICE ARRESTS.

UPDATED (7/9/018): Non-‘Shithole’ Countries Seem To Recover Quickly From Disasters, Natural Or Man-Made

Business, Economy, Federal Reserve Bank, Human Accomplishment, IMMIGRATION, Intelligence, Technology

In 2008, Iceland collapsed under the weight of its banking industry’s federal-reserve like excesses.

In 2018, Iceland’s is a red hot economy. The highly able population has shifted from finance to technology and tourism. No bailout—allowing the banks to collapse and a natural recovery take place—has a lot to do with it.

“… rather than stepping in with taxpayers’ money like the British and Americans did, the Icelandic government let its banks go bust.”

Likewise did Chile cope reasonably well with what was “one of the most powerful earthquakes in history.” We hear nothing of Chile’s struggles to recover.

Not so Haiti, the Africa of the Western Hemisphere.

Haiti is forever convulsed by political and natural disasters. It remains the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere, where four out of five people live in poverty and more than half in abject poverty (NYT).

It’s nearly two decades since a pair of earthquakes struck El Salvador in 2001. The US government granted Salvadorians a generous grant of privilege in the late 1990s, in the form of a temporary protected status (TPS) for nearly 200,000.

Ditto the “Haitians who were stranded after an earthquake in 2010.”

To the din of protest, “the United States’ Department of Homeland Security had only recently revoked the so-called temporary protection (it lasted nearly 2 decades).

“Shithole countries,” a Trump coinage, don’t seem to recover very well from disasters, natural or man-made, do they?

SEE RELATED READING:

“Trump’s ‘Shithole’ Controversy Deconstructed (Part 1)”
“Why Trump Pooh-Poohed ‘S-ithole’ Countries (Part 2)”

UPDATE (7/9/018):

Meanwhile in Haiti ...

As riots erupt in Haiti, never forget that the country's extreme poverty and problems were caused by white people: https://t.co/M8PUTNHjPj pic.twitter.com/wHI5c8qRtE

— The Root (@TheRoot) July 9, 2018

1 Reason The State Department Turned On #RexTillerson: He Tried Trimming Budgets & Getting Rid Of Deadwood

Business, Economy, Federal Reserve Bank, Free Markets, Government, Political Economy, Taxation, The State

The Economist notes that Rex Tillerson was a poor secretary of state—but not for the reasons I would advance.

One reason for their opinion is that, “Disastrously for morale, he declined to defend his own department when the White House proposed cutting its budget by 25% or more … Mr Tillerson squandered goodwill with a corporate restructuring that felt to many staff like an invitation to resign. At one point, outside consultants sent round a questionnaire asking: “To optimally support the future mission of the Department, what one or two things should your work unit totally stop doing or providing?” (“Trump Unbound: In foreign affairs, America just moved closer to one-man rule,” March 17, 2018.)

TILLESRSON TRIED TO CUT GOVERNMENT! Defending your employees, The Economist here equates with increasing or maintaining the budget for the department, it diplomats, envoys and other career and or deadwood staff.

State institutions are self-reinforcing and not amenable to reform; they grow through failure.

So while it would be nice if state institutions were able to reform, because of the structure of incentives, the state cannot be corrected. The incentive structure underlying state institutions is antithetical to reform.

To correct processes that may be killing people—affirmative action, when the subject of special privileges isn’t qualified—you have to cut budgets in the billions. This likely will never happen, in state institutions, because they don’t abide by the profit motive. So to express belief in this is to express belief in the possibility of the state fixing itself.

The libertarian grasps that the state grows through inefficiency. The more it bungles—the greater its budget will be. Economically, the state’s incentives are inverted. A private company, on the other hand, grows through economic and performative efficiencies; by singles the customer. The state is the opposite. As a monopoly, it need please nobody. For example, the education system is a giant failure. Will it be scrapped? Of course not. The system will reward itself with MORE, not less, funds to fix the problem.

This is a structural fact of the state.

Why can the state grow and prosper through inefficiency? Because it has access to the funds of an indentured third party, taxpayers, and has the promiscuous use of the printing press.

A private institution can come back from the abyss, because, economically, it will go bust if it doesn’t start pleasing customers. However, if, like the Florida bridge collapse, a private enterprise is working in tandem with the state, then taxpayers bail it out.

Profit is privatized, loss is socialized.

Most people no longer read or understand the economics of the state. Ten years ago, I had readers who had at least read Hazlitt’s Economics in One Lesson.