Sailing the Last Voyage with Newton and Pascal
While looking for something completely unrelated, I ran across this September 2007 post which bears repeating: "Spengler’s" piece about Western grasshoppers and Chinese ants points out one of the sad facts of U.S. economic policy: its willingness to endure long-term trade deficits without allowing those who accumulate the dollars to invest them in U.S. equities. …
Continue reading "Western Grasshoppers and Chinese Ants: Once More With Feeling"
They're at it again in South Carolina: South Carolina Rep. Mike Pitts has introduced legislation that would mandate that gold and silver coins replace federal currency as legal tender in his state. As the Palmetto Scoop first reported, Pitts, a Republican, introduced legislation this month banning "the unconstitutional substitution of Federal Reserve Notes for silver …
Walter Russell Mead hits the problem squarely on the head: Back before the global warming mess blew up, I wrote a post about the breakup of the ‘blue social model‘. Not to regurgitate the whole post, but the mid-twentieth century saw the US (like most advanced countries at the time) develop an economic and political …
Continue reading "More Elitist Snob Advice: Make the Blue Beast Work for the People"
A couple of weeks ago, in my article Strange Bedfellows: Liberals and Muslims I made the following statement: The left, by and large, is a statist movement. Their goals are ultimately achieved through supra-national organisations, the EU currently being the most successful. (The UN is somewhat more complicated because of the presence of Third World …
Continue reading "Liberals and Libertarians Can't Get It Together"
As one commenter noted, wonder what took so long: Dollar-denominated risk assets, including asset-backed securities and corporates, are no longer wanted at the State Administration of Foreign Exchange (SAFE), nor at China’s large commercial banks. The Chinese government has ordered its reserve managers to divest itself of riskier securities and hold only Treasuries and US …
Caroline Baum at Bloomberg tries to put on a "rational" face on this problem: “Washington doesn’t get it.” That generic statement is tripping off the tongues of populists and Tea Partiers, business groups and bankers alike. In short, the public is peeved at the politicians. I heard it this week from William Dunkelberg, chief economist …
Continue reading "Washington Gets Small Business, It Just Doesn't Like It"
Seems to be about all our President hears these days: In response to President Obama's comments on infrastructure in his Jan. 27 State of the Union address, ASCE (American Society of Civil Engineers) has issued this statement by 2010 President Blaine D. Leonard, P.E., D.GE, F.ASCE: We appreciate that the president mentioned in his address …
It's hard to catalogue all of the whining that our President and other members of his party have made because a) the Republicans have opposed their agenda (health care, cap and trade, card check, etc.) and b) it has not passed as a "consequence" of this. If we look at this objectively, however, we come …
That's the question people in the West simply will not ask: The second problem, and this is the most serious, is that Shirk fails to demonstrate that China has made such a great economic leap not only because it engaged in market reform - the former Soviet Union and East European countries did the same …
Continue reading "Is China Succeeding Because of Its Totalitarian Heritage, or in Spite of It?"
This, from Black Swan Capital: There exists the potential that this tighter-money posturing, maneuvering, squirming or strategizing by the Fed will ultimately support the US dollar’s value. Well it can’t hurt, considering the overwhelming sentiment that the Fed will opt to inflate away the US dollar. And that brings me to something President Obama mentioned …
Continue reading "State of the Union Takeaway: We Need to Export More Goods. But How?"
Positive Infinity 