This lovely chart from Gold and Silver Prices Surging - NYTimes.com beautifully illustrates why I will never support 'the gold standard' for money. See how gold climbed from the late Sixties to its previous peak January 1980. I not only witnessed that fever up close; I had a mild case myself.
My own thinking falls somewhere in between the two sides he discusses.
Salmon is correct that the current system masks the risks inherent in holding any security or commodity, including cash. However, there is and always will be a demand for a safe place to stash cash pending reinvestment or distribution.
Call it the great American sell-off . For years now Americans have been gathering and collecting at an amazing pace, filling homes that over the past half-century have more than doubled in size, to an average of nearly 2,500 square feet. And even that hasn't been enough to contain our nation's overflow of stuff. These days nearly one in 10 U.S. households maintains at least one self-storage unit, 65 percent more than did so in 1995. Filling these spaces, of course, comes naturally to baby boomers.
Politics in the United States is a game played on multiple levels, and ideology is only the first. Walker was playing on a second, deeper level, where the issues are secondary. Here, the goal is not so much to advance one party's agenda, but to actively undermine the infrastructure that allows the opposing party to exist at all.
Iceland's taxpayers are balking at bailing out their own idiot bank, Landsbanki, and who can blame them?
Britain and the Netherlands decide to compensate their own bankers for losses on investments in Landbanki's paper and now want Iceland's 230,000 eligible voters to reimburse them by taking on around $25,000 in debt each?
Last Monday, when Kerry McCarthy MP got up to speak in the House of Commons she made history – not for the words she spoke, but for reading them off her iPad.
Later in the week, the Speaker of the House said he could no longer “reasonably prevent” the use of iPads and smartphones in the chamber, so long as they didn’t disturb fellow MPs.
More information from the Fed's recent data dump although the interpretation could be better.
The structure of the Federal Reserve System was such that it could only enact monetary policy through its Primary Dealer system -- an add-on to the System ~1960. Of the banks listed as borrowers in the article are all or almost all Primary Dealers. If they start failing, they not only drag each other down but maybe the Fed as well.
“Liquidate labor, liquidate stocks, liquidate the farmers, liquidate real estate.” That, according to Herbert Hoover, was the advice he received from Andrew Mellon, the Treasury secretary, as America plunged into depression. To be fair, there’s some question about whether Mellon actually said that; all we have is Hoover’s version, written many years later."
Maybe Krugman is correct. Maybe Mellon-style liquidation is now the official doctrine of the G.O.P. Maybe rather than making the comparison then using it to sneer and argue against G.O.P. plans, it might be more effective to make the comparison then use it to advantage.
When people think of malnutrition, they usually picture its most acute form—listless infants with bloated bellies, the little victims of famine. But there is a chronic manifestation of hunger, too, milder but more widespread. It affects those with enough calories to eat but too few micronutrients (vitamins, minerals and so on). They suffer the diseases of poor nutrition.
Cellphone companies do not typically divulge how much information they collect, so Mr. Spitz went to court to find out exactly what his cellphone company, Deutsche Telekom, knew about his whereabouts.
Aside from my need for information on usage of mobile phones for couponing and early forms of mobile commerce (trend reports to come in Q2 and Q3), I wanted to see if people would admit to behavior I had been overhearing in stalls everywhere.
“Vote for a Republican,” my grandfather used to say, “and you get a depression. Vote for a Democrat and you get a war.” That seemed like a pretty good rule of thumb in the twentieth century: Warren Harding and Herbert Hoover gave us depressions, and Woodrow Wilson, Franklin Roosevelt, Harry Truman and Jack Kennedy (with an assist from Lyndon Johnson) all gave us wars.
A terrific perspective on the way we are from Steve Waldman:
"So, call me a philistine, but I really think that the Tea Party types have gotten a bum rap over their whole “Keep Government Out Of My Medicare” slogan. Yes, Medicare is a government benefit. One’s Medicare card represents a claim on the government that can be redeemed for goods and services, usually delivered by private sector providers.
A new study penned by among others Kauffman’s chief investment officer, Harold Bradley and vice president of research Robert E. Litan — a regulatory expert who has supervised financial investigations into NASDAQ and others — raises the alert on what they claim could be a canary in the coal mine in terms of systemic risk for the industry at large.
While the report is likely to prove controversial with some market practitioners — it certainly raises points which are worth investigating further.
