The Federal Reserve's new whiz-bang - - -

"Forward Guidance" is the FED's main new whiz-bang financial manipulation toy. Here's what they themselves say about it - - -

With short-term interest rates at the zero lower bound, forward guidance has become a key tool for central bankers, and yet we know little about its effectiveness. Standard medium-scale ...models tend to grossly overestimate the impact of forward guidance on the macroeconomy -- a phenomenon we call the "forward guidance puzzle." The Forward Guidance Puzzle - Federal Reserve Bank of New York

So, basically, they don't know what the un-fuck they're doing with something that "has become a key tool for central bankers."

"Forward guidance" is just FED spokes-folks publicly explaining what they think they're going to do. Before this, it was unofficial, minor, and called "jawboning." Before that, the FED kept everything hidden as if they were bluffing in a high-stakes poker game.

So the future of the fiat-based world economy hangs on something of which the FED admits, "we know little about its effectiveness," our "models tend to grossly overestimate the impact," and in fact, "forward guidance" is a "puzzle."

(rofl)

I've fallen and I can't get up - - -

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Where all the inflation has gone - - -

The U.S. Federal Reserve (the FED), in addition to setting interest rates to the lowest in history, is creating $85 billion in money-equivalent every month by buying various bonds. This is all inherently inflationary, but so far, not much inflation is showing up in the U.S. economy. Why not?

Because for the time being, it's going elsewhere - - -

Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff criticized U.S. monetary policy saying it has harmed Brazil and other developing countries. Rousseff said the U.S. decision to leave benchmark lending rates near zero has created an overload of speculative money that floods into economies like Brazil.
+
Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff: "Such expansionist monetary policies in and of themselves, is isolation, regarding the fiscal policies, ultimately lead to a depreciation in the value of the currencies of developed countries thus impairing growth outlooks in emerging countries." --Democracy NOW! Headlines, Tuesday, April 10, 2012

And here - - -   

Annual [Argentine] inflation, clocked by private analysts at over 20 percent... --Argentine leader's image falls as inflation soars | Reuters

Now we have this logical evolution:

Brazilian authorities are likely to tighten monetary policy faster than expected to combat resurgent inflation ...the central bank's monetary policy committee will hike rates by at least 25 basis points to 7.5% when it meets on Wednesday.

"We have passed the point of no return," said Marcelo Carvalho head of Latin America economic research at BNP Paribas, who predicted a 50 basis point hike. "Inflation has been too high too long and it's time to wake up." Brazil poised to hike rates: analysts | LatinFinance

But hey, what's a little more Krugmanite collateral damage among friends?

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What's with gold? The Bigger Picture - - -

The titular price of gold dropped about $84 dollars on Friday, April 12, 2013 in an obviously unprecedented manner. Yet, at the same time, ABN AMRO, one of the largest banks in Europe, failed to deliver the PHYSICAL gold it had contracted to deliver and defaulted, Venezuela, Germany, and apparently the Netherlands are repatriating their gold from the U.S. Fed -- and the U.S. Mint has periodically suspended sales of precious coins because of a lack of metal to cast them with.

SOMETHING is going on. Maybe it's just a normal trashing of the gold price by the government-banking axis, but to an extreme degree.

The question is, "Why NOW?"

Hopefully the answer is, "Because we've been trying to do this to protect our Keynesian zero-real-interest-rates against gold ever since it hit $1900/oz and threatened them -- and just NOW all the factors were finally right." Former U.S. Assistant Secretary of the Treasury Paul Craig Roberts thinks this is the case.

That's most likely.

BUT if the answer is, "We see a serious ripple in the fiat force, and we're trying to head the disaster off at the pass," they may be right. Worse, their blatantly obvious action against gold may precipitate the very disaster they fear and perhaps are even semi-aware of from history.

In that case, here's what that would likely look like - - - My Blog Former U.S. Under Secretary of Treasury Paul Craig Roberts explains what the bankster-government axis may be worried about.

According to veteran metals trader Andrew McGuire, the western banking-government amalgam, spearheaded as usual by Bankster Goldman Sachs, dumped more than an unheard of 500 tons of PAPER gold on the market late last week. And pimped, cajoled, and forced other weak hands to play along.

What's paper have to do with it? "Paper gold" merely means it was promises to deliver gold, not gold itself. Which is what makes the failure of ABN AMRO to deliver promised gold very interesting indeed.

It's directly analagous to the beginning of an old fashioned run on a bank where the bank was unable to redeem its "Redeemable in Gold on Demand" dollars -- the only Constitutional kind -- because they'd printed those redeemable I.O.U.s for more gold than they actually had. If anyone else had done that, it would be called "counterfeiting."

And because the banks are so interconnected, this isn't just a run on ABN AMRO.

AND maybe the repatriation movement, besides being interesting, is the straw that lit the fuse as Venezuela, Gremany, probably Holland, and perhaps some other countries are repatriating their gold which has been theoretically stored in the valuts beneath the Federal Resreve Bank of New York -- made famous in Die Hard With a Vengeance, the third in the series.

History? That was when France, a few other countries, and most importantly, the markets, called Uncle Scam's Bretton-Woods "London Gold Pool" paper-gold bluff by taking delivery of actual physical gold from the U.S. and its other eight dragooned central banks. In stupidly trying to again raise the market bet and cap the price of gold, Uncle airlifted a bunch of gold to London, ultimately collapsing the floor of one storage vault. But that was all to no avail. Being caught with its counterfeit shorts down, finally, on August 15, 1971, with Executive Order 11615, Nixon "closed the gold window," thus abrogating the international convertibility of the U.S. dollar to gold and finalizing the biggest default in history. So far.

P.S. As of April 14, 2013, 22:57, it looks like Goldman et.al. are still working the plan. Be interesting to see just how far they can go before the markets once again slap them upside the head.

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The REAL Fear Factor

Can YOU find the common denominator?

Folks including H.L. Mencken, U.S. founder James Madison, U.S. President Dwight D. Eisenhower, Henry Kissinger, Soviet dictator Josef Stalin, U.S. General Douglas MacArthur, and Prof. Chalmers Johnson all explain the main factor we should fear.

"The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed -- and thus clamorous to be led to safety -- by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary." -- H.L. Mencken

"It is a universal truth that the loss of liberty at home is to be charged to the provisions against danger, real or pretended, from abroad." --James Madison

"Our (U.S.) government has kept us in a perpetual state of fear - kept us in a continuous stampede of patriotic fervor - with the cry of grave national emergency ... Always there has been some terrible evil at home or some monstrous foreign power that was going to gobble us up if we did not blindly rally behind the exorbitant funds demanded. Yet, in retrospect, these disasters seem never to have happened, seem never to have been quite real." --US General Douglas MacArthur, Address to the Annual Stockholders Sperry Rand Corporation (30 July 1957)

"Today Americans would be outraged if UN troops entered Los Angeles to restore order; tomorrow, they will be grateful. This is especially true if they were told there is an outside threat from beyond, whether real or promulgated, that threatened our very existence. When presented with this scenario, individual rights will be willingly relinquished for the guarantee of their well-being by their world government." --Henry Kissinger, June 8, 1992, Evian, France, Media Protects Bilderberg, Spotlight.org

"It is part of the general pattern of misguided policy that our country is now geared to an arms economy which was bred in an artificially induced psychosis of war hysteria and nurtured upon an incessant propaganda of fear. While such an economy may produce a sense of seeming prosperity for the moment, it rests on an illusionary foundation of complete unreliability and renders among our political leaders almost a greater fear of peace than is their fear of war." --U.S. General Douglas MacArthur, Speech to the Michigan legislature, in Lansing, Michigan (15 May 1952).

"The easiest way to gain control of a population is to carry out acts of terror. [The public] will clamor for such laws if their personal security is threatened." --??Josef Stalin

Given this background, it is not surprising that some have seen the US failure to avert the 9/11 attacks as creating an invaluable pretext for attacking Afghanistan in a war that had clearly already been well planned in advance. There is a possible precedent for this. The US national archives reveal that President Roosevelt used exactly this approach in relation to Pearl Harbor on December 7 1941. ... Similarly the PNAC [Project for a New American Century] blueprint of September 2000 states that the process of transforming the US into "tomorrow's dominant force" is likely to be a long one in the absence of "some catastrophic and catalyzing event -like a new Pearl Harbor". This war on terrorism is bogus, Michael Meacher, MP & U.K. environment minister, The Guardian, Saturday September 6, 2003

"In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the militaryindustrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.

"We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes. We should take nothing for granted. Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals, so that security and liberty may prosper together." --Dwight D. Eisenhower, Military-Industrial Complex Speech, 1961, Public Papers of the Presidents, Dwight D. Eisenhower, 1960, p. 1035- 1040

"Barbarian invasions would be superfluous: we are our own Huns." --Bertrand de Jouvenal

"This time his [Prof. Chalmers Johnson] tone was more alarmist, while his focus was on the way an American version of military Keynesianism was failing the country. He feared that the U.S. would be simultaneously overwhelmed by related tides of militarism and bankruptcy. ...and predicted that, in the reasonably near future, the U.S. would have to choose between remaining a democratic society or becoming a military dictatorship." --Chalmers Johnson vs. the Empire by Tom Engelhardt -- Antiwar.com

[Police Chief] Stovall told the group of almost 40 residents that beginning in 2013, the department would deploy a new street crimes unit to high crime areas on foot to take back the streets. "[Police are] going to be in SWAT gear and have AR-15s around their neck," Stovall said. "If you're out walking, we're going to stop you, ask why you're out walking, check for your ID." Arkansas Police chief says citizens could be subject to ID checks

Government officials are quietly installing sophisticated audio surveillance systems on public buses across the country to eavesdrop on passengers, according to documents obtained by The Daily. Plans to implement the technology are under way in cities from San Francisco to Hartford, Conn., and Eugene, Ore., to Columbus, Ohio. ...With the new systems, experts say, transit officials can effectively send an invisible police officer to transcribe the individual conversations of every passenger riding on a public bus. BIG BROTHER'S LISTENING - The Daily

The Pentagon has confirmed plans to deploy hundreds of additional spies overseas as part of an effort to expand its intelligence operations worldwide. The Washington Post reports the Defense Intelligence Agency hopes to use the covert operatives as part of an overall force of some 1,600 officials around the world. The proposed expansion would ultimately result in what the Pentagon aims to be an espionage network rivaling the CIA in size. It would also likely result in an increased number of deadly air strikes and other covert actions that would otherwise be subjected to congressional oversight. --Pentagon to Deploy Hundreds of Spies Worldwide, Democracy Now! December 03, 2012

William Binney, the former chief of research, the National Security Agency's signals intelligence division, describes this situation that we are in now as "turnkey totalitarianism," that the whole system of totalitarianism has been built -- the car, the engine has been built -- and it's just a matter of turning the key. And actually, when we look to see some of the crackdowns on WikiLeaks and the grand jury process and targeted assassinations and so on, actually it's arguable that key has already been partly turned. --Wikileaks' Julian Assange

Talk of imminent threat to our national security through the application of external force is pure nonsense. Our threat is from the insidious forces working from within which have already so drastically altered the character of our free institutions - those institutions we proudly called the American way of life." --General Douglas MacArthur, Speech to the Michigan legislature, in Lansing, Michigan (15 May 1952)

So tell me, what did all these informed folks think the main factor we have to fear is?

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ALSO RELEVANT:

Freedom and the Indians

What the Elders Say

The nature of "reality" via Bohr, Feynman, & Quantum Mechanics

The Essence of Government by Ostensive Definition

Governments don't aid progress, they retard it

UNCOMMON SENSE: The REAL Fear Factor

Franz Oppenheimer, The State [1919], Translator: John Milton Gitterman

The Criminality of the State - Albert Jay Nock - Mises Daily

Silicon Valley Roused by Secession Call - NYTimes.com

The End of the Nation-State? - NYTimes.com

It's not who or what you think - - -

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The OTHER "Trickle-down" theory

The "trickle-down" theory is that if you reduce taxes on the rich, that money will "trickle down" in the form of jobs to the less rich.  The OTHER "trickle-down" theory is that if you give that tax money to the government, it will "trickle down" to the less rich.  --L. Reichard White, Monday, August 20, 2012 3:45 AM

Where Wars Do -- and Don't Come From

Where wars DO come from:

Why of course the people don't want war. ... That is understood. But, after all, it is the leaders of the country who determine the policy and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along --Head NAZI Hermann Goering

"It is not civilizations that promote clashes. They occur when old-fashioned leaders look for old-fashioned ways to solve problems by rousing their people to armed confrontation." --Kenichi Ohmae, The End Of The Nation State, (New York: The Free Press 1995), p. 11.

Mr. Bertie Felstead: "A German began singing All Through The Night, then more voices joined in and the British troops responded with Good King Wencelas... the next morning, all the soldiers were shouting to one another, "Hello Tommy, Hello Fritz" ... The Germans started it, coming out of their trenches and walking over to us. Nobody decided for us - we just climbed over our parapet and went over to them, we thought nobody would shoot at us if we all mingled together... There wouldn't have been a war if it had been left to the public. We didn't want to fight but we thought we were defending England." England's Oldest Man Remembers The 1915 Christmas Truce

People do not make wars; governments do. --U.S. President Ronald Reagan

President George W. Bush and seven of his administration's top officials... made at least 935 false statements in the two years following September 11, 2001, about the national security threat posed by Saddam Hussein's Iraq. ...an exhaustive examination of the record shows that the statements were part of an orchestrated campaign that ...led the nation to war under decidedly false pretenses. --Charles Lewis and Mark Reading-Smith, False Pretenses: Iraq THE WAR CARD Orchestrated Deception on the Path to War, www.publicintegrity.org

Wars throughout history have been waged for conquest and plunder. ...The feudal barons of the Middle Ages, the economic predecessors of the capitalists of our day, declared all wars. And their miserable serfs fought all the battles. The poor, ignorant serfs had been taught to revere their masters; to believe that when their masters declared war upon one another, it was their patriotic duty to fall upon one another and to cut one another's throats for the profit and glory of the lords and barons who held them in contempt. And that is war in a nutshell. The master class has always declared the wars; the subject class has always fought the battles. The master class has had all to gain and nothing to lose, while the subject class has had nothing to gain and all to lose--especially their lives. ...the working class who freely shed their blood and furnish the corpses, have never yet had a voice in either declaring war or making peace. It is the ruling class that invariably does both. They alone declare war and they alone make peace. Yours not to reason why; Yours but to do and die. That is their motto ... The Anti-war Speech That Earned Eugene Debs 10 Years in Prison, Socialist Party convention in Canton, Ohio, 16 June 1918

By contrast, where wars DON'T come from:

...we preferred hunting to a life of idleness on our reservations. At times we did not get enough to eat and we were not allowed to hunt. All we wanted was peace and to be left alone. Soldiers came and destroyed our villages. Then Long Hair (Custer) came...They say we massacred him, but he would have done the same to us. Our first impulse was to escape but we were so hemmed in we had to fight. - Crazy Horse/Tashunkewitko

The Aztec strategy of war was based on the capture of prisoners by individual warriors, not on working as a group to kill the enemy in battle. By the time the Aztecs came to recognize what warfare meant in European terms, it was too late. - Aztec

New England's first Indian war, the Pequot War of 1636-37, provides a case study of the intensified warfare Europeans brought to America. Allied with the Narragansetts, traditional enemies of the Pequots, the colonists attacked at dawn. ... The slaughter shocked the Narragansetts, who had wanted merely to subjugate the Pequots, not exterminate them. The Narragansetts reproached the English for their style of warfare, crying, "It is naught, it is naught, because it is too furious, and slays too many men." In turn, Capt. John Underhill scoffed, saying that the Narragansett style of fighting was "more for pastime, than to conquer and subdue enemies." Underhill's analysis of the role of warfare in Narragansett society was correct, and might accurately be applied to other tribes as well. Through the centuries, whites frequently accused their Native allies of not fighting hard enough. -James W. Loewen, LIES MY TEACHER TOLD ME, (New York, NY: Touchstone 1996), p. 118

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The OTHER police state - - -

With the death of Kim Jong Il, everyone was reminded of the North Korean police state. But what about the OTHER police state - - -

Study: One-Third of Young People Will Be Arrested Before Age 23

Another study found about one-third of young people [in the U.S.] will be arrested before they turn 23. The study examined arrests - not including minor traffic violations - for kids ages eight to 23. Researchers said they found between 30.2 percent and 41.4 percent had been arrested. --DemocracyNOW! Headlines for December 20, 2011

And that's BEFORE the indefinite detention of Americans without charges or trial enshrined in the so-called "National Defense Appropriations Act."

That OTHER police state also treats its unjailed kids well - - -

Study Finds 1.6 Million Children Homeless in 2010

In other economic news, a study has found 1.6 million children in the United States - or one in 45 kids - were homeless last year. The National Center on Family Homelessness said its study is a "call to action for all of us to address child homelessness before we lose another generation." The group said the child homelessness rate has jumped 33 percent since 2007. --DemocracyNOW! Headlines for December 20, 2011

Fascism = Socialism = Totalitarianism

Socialism, once it gets bigger than face-to-face , gets taken over by those who follow the Golden Rule -- as in "he who has the gold makes the rules." SEE "Capture Theory," for example. Today, the catch-phrase is "public-private enterprise." Normally that morphs into full frontal Fascism (partnership between business & government), as confessed by, among others, the Nazis.

But "NAZI," the acronym for Hitler's so-called fascists, stands for "Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei" or "National Socialist German Workers' Party," defining fascism and national socialism to be one and the same.

These supposedly "fascist" Nazis originated the Volkswagen, translated literally as "People'sWagon," a name one would expect to be more at home with avowed socialists. With an apparent flash of insight, head Nazi Joseph Goebbels, in a letter to a Communist leader, assured him that "Nazism and Communism are really the same thing. You and I are fighting one another, but we are not really enemies," he wrote according to William L. Shirer in his The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, (Greenwich: Fawcett Crest, 1959)

The "same thing" in the case of "Nazism and Communism" is a centralized totalitarian state which, as history proves again and again, results in death, destruction, misery, and disaster for it's citizens no matter which way it starts out.

The common denominator of "socialism" and "fascism" is that once you create a "government" it is eventually taken over by the moneyed interests and those with political influence and hierarchical tendencies -- which guarantees application of The Iron Law of Oligarchy.

These folks don't care what you call them, in fact it often serves them well to pretend "socialism." Being the power whores they are (don't mean to insult sex-workers), they'll take the power and money any which way they can.

As the quip goes, "When you go to bed with government, you get more than a good night's sleep." It doesn't matter too much whether they claim they're socialists or fascists -- invite a government into your bed and you'll likely end up with a seriously painful and persistent case of herpes in undesirable places. And, eventually, totalitarianism.   

ALSO RELEVANT:

What the Elders Say

--L. Reichard White, Wednesday, October 05, 2011 3:52 PM

Nature of the Beast

"In India, the word public is now a Hindi word. It means people. In Hindi, we have sarkar and public, the government and the people. Inherent in this use is the underlying assumption that the government is quite separate from 'the people.' ...Even today, fifty seven years on to the day, the truly vanquished still look upon the government as mai-baap, the parent and provider. The somewhat more radical, those who still have fire in their bellies, see it as chor, the thief, the snatcher-away of all things." --Arundhati Roy, Public Power in the Age of Empire

"I discovered that in our country [Pakistan] there's a tiny elite who has usurped the resources of the whole country. The whole country panders to this tiny elite. By the way, I belong to them. And the rich are getting richer. And the vast majority of people don't even have basic rights.... what is happening is, the elite has basically captured the government. Whether it's one party or the other, basically the interests are the same. And so, they come into government, and they plunder the country. They usurp the resources. And so, common people are deprived of all the basic needs..." --Pakistani Opposition Leader Imran Khan, January 30, 2008

"Government is not eloquence, it is not reason; it is force, and like fire, makes a dangerous servant and a fearful master." --George Washington

Just another I.O.U.

There's always a discount on an I.O.U. The amount depends on its perceived likely-hood of being paid. The dollar is, in essence, such an I.O.U. The perception of repayment is dropping and you can follow it by watching the value of dollars on the market. --L. Reichard White, Thursday, November 11, 2010 3:22 AM

More symptoms - - -

- - - of unsound money:

Our parents were "The Greatest Generation," and they earned that title by making enormous sacrifices and investments to build us a world of abundance. My generation, "The Baby Boomers," turned out to be what the writer Kurt Andersen called "The Grasshopper Generation." We've eaten through all that abundance like hungry locusts. --Op-Ed Columnist Thomas L. Friedman, Root Canal Politics - NYTimes.com

These are just two more symptoms of unsound money. The boomers - - - and everyone in line behind us - - - are just following the incentives implicit in fiat (paper/electronic) money: Because of chronic yearly inflation caused by central bankers and politicians, this kind of "cash is trash" and thus saving is stupid. Our parents on the other hand, behaved in accordance with the incentives implicit in real Constitutional "hard" money (gold and silver) -- which can't be inflated.

Right between the eyes -- free vs. regulated

Email To CNBC sent May 12, 2010:
==========
I heard two sound-bytes on your air that struck me "right between the eyes" -- in the frontal lobes.

1. In the [2008] financial crisis, it was the regulated entities, not the shadow entities that blew up. --James S. Chanos (Kynikos), May 6, 2010, 07:53:49.

2. Only about 35% of stock market trades are done on the "official" markets -- the rest are done on markets you never even heard of. --Yesterday [May 11, 2010] about 2:49PM

Can you maybe do a segment on the implications, which seem to be:

"We need to do away with the current financial establishment in favor of  unregulated true free-markets."

Or perhaps,

"We're doing away with regulated markets whether we know it or not -- and unregulated works better."

Or did I miss something??

Health, happiness, & long life,
Rick

P.S. Baring the special segment, how about a personal note from Kudlow -- or Michelle Caruso-Cabrera?

Who luvs ya babe? Episode 3

HINT: NOT politicians. In this case, not Brit politicians

...a more fundamental point is this: all these three [British political] parties agree with each other on the economic measures that have to be taken, i.e., massive cuts in social welfare public spending, which will hurt the poor, and to support the banking system and the financial system in this country. ...All three political parties are agreed that the war in Afghanistan has to continue as long as the United States says it has to ... So I'm just bemused when I hear talks of a progressive coalition. What is going to be progressive about it? All three parties are going to do more or less the same thing, which is attack the poor. --Tariq Ali on Britain's Political Deadlock, Gordon Brown's Resignation and Pakistan's Role in the Times Square Bombing Attempt

The Iron Law of Oligarchy: Another Case Study

The "Iron Law of Oligarchy:" Another example - - - 

...I discovered that in our country [Pakistan] there's a tiny elite who has usurped the resources of the whole country [Pakistan]. The whole country panders to this tiny elite. By the way, I belong to them. And the rich are getting richer. And the vast majority of people don't even have basic rights.... what is happening is, the elite has basically captured the government. Whether it's one party or the other, basically the interests are the same. And so, they come into government, and they plunder the country. They usurp the resources. And so, common people are deprived of all the basic needs... Pakistani Opposition Leader Imran Khan on Musharraf, Bhutto, and How the U.S. Has Undermined Pakistani Democracy, January 30, 2008

How inflation led to totalitarianism in Rome

The episodes of extreme inflation took a standard form. ... The government ...resorted to debasing the coins of the realm. This took the form of replacing the gold and silver in coins with copper and other cheaper metals. Over the period 218 to 268 A.D. the silver content of Roman coins dropped to one five thousandth of its original level. Sometimes the size and weight of coins were reduced. It also meant vastly increasing the amount of coins in circulation. There was a corresponding increase in prices. The emperors usually blamed the price increases on the greed of merchants. ... In 301 AD Diocletian issued an edict declaring fixed prices; i.e., price controls. His edict provided for the death penalty for anyone selling above the control prices. There was also penalties (less severe) for anyone paying more than the control price. Irate consumers sometimes destroyed the businesses of those who sold higher than the control prices. In the short-run these draconian measures may have curbed inflation but in the long-run the results were disaster. Merchants stopped selling goods but this led to penalties against hoarding. People went out of business but Diocletian countered with laws saying that every man had to pursue the occupation of their father. The penalty for not doing so was death. This was justified on the basis that leaving the occupation of ones father was like a soldier deserting in time of war. The effect of this was to turn free men into serfs.   EPISODES OF HYPERINFLATION, Thayer Watkins, ECONOMICS DEPARTMENT, SAN JOSE STATE UNIVERSITY

Who is that Masked Man?

There is a persistent rumor that one big buyer is supporting the U.S. Treasury market. --CNBC, Tuesday, January 19, 2010 7:51 AM

Who/what can afford to take up the slack as U.S. Treasury issuance sky-rockets and Japan, China, India, etc. slack-off their Treasury buying habit? 

Every once in awhile the CNBC commentators sort of drop a similar hint, look at each other out of the corners of their eyes like this means something -- but they better not think too deeply about it or say it out loud.

Perverted (state) capitalism -- A disgusting example

What the Bush administration has created in Iraq is a sort of paradise of perverted capitalism, where revenues are forcibly extracted from the customer by the state, and obscene profits arehanded out not by the market but by an unaccountable government bureauc­racy. This is the triumphant culmination of two centuries of flawed white-people thinking, a preposterous mix of authoritarian socialism and laissez-faire profiteering, with all the worst aspects of both ideologies rolled up into one pointless, supremely idiotic military adventure -- American men and women dying by the thousands, so that Karl Marx and Adam Smith can blow each other in a Middle Eastern glory hole. --The Great Iraq Swindle, How Bush Allowed an Army of For-Profit Contractors to Invade the U.S. Treasury, Rollingstone.com, From Issue 1034, Posted Aug 23, 2007 8:51 AM