1. Venn Diagram of the Day (above). Inspired by the March 6, 2013 article Salon article titled “Hugo Chavez’s economic miracle” (by David Sirota), here’s a slice: Chavez became the bugaboo of American politics because his full-throated advocacy of socialism and redistributionism at once represented a fundamental critique of neoliberal [...]

Authored by Charles Hugh-Smith via OfTwoMinds blog, When “socialist” states have to impose finance-capital extremes that even exceed the financialization of nominally capitalist economies, it gives the lie to their claims of “socialism.” OK, so our collective eyes start glazing over when we see Marx and Orwell in the subject [...]

Authored by Martin Armstrong via ArmstrongEconomics.com, The dwindling credit of Turkey and significant decline in its currency, has led to the new clever idea of confiscating gold with a smile. The Turkish Central Bank has come up with an idea of how to confiscate private gold while pretending they are [...]

China Bans North Korean Coal! In a show of solidarity with the U.S. against North Korea, China has stopped buying coal from the communist regime after last week’s missile test. Now, they’re importing more coal from the United States. This decision comes after President Trump met with Chinese President Xi Jinping [...]

Authored by Charles Hugh-Smith via OfTwoMinds blog, Trying to reduce the carefully choreographed drama to one stage and one audience risks misunderstanding the signal. It seems many media observers are confused by events in Syria and the swirl of competing narratives. Did the Swamp drain Trump? Did the Neocons succeed [...]

Authored by Lance Roberts via RealInvestmentAdvice.com, There is a really big crisis coming. Think about it this way. After 8 years and a 230% stock market advance the pension funds of Dallas, Chicago, and Houston are in severe trouble. But it isn’t just these municipalities that are in trouble, but [...]

Roger Bate Western regulators have found evidence of it, scholars unearthed empirical support for it, but now even the lead lobbyist for its industry admits it; most Indian medicines are not equivalent to the medicines they copy. People walk past a chemist shop at a market in Mumbai, India, June [...]

Once again it appears that Trump was right: the conspiracy theory that a close Obama associate worked to “unmask” the Trump team, resulting in the ongoing media spectacle over “collusion” between Trump and the Kremlin, has been confirmed, first by Mike Cernovich, and now by Bloomberg itself.   As noted [...]

Hillary Plans On Setting A Reporter Straight…. Recently released Huma Abedin State Department emails – acquired by Judicial Watch via FOIA request, reveal Clinton State Department staff planning to summon New York Times reporter David Brooks for an “OTR” (off the record) conversation over a “shot” he took at Hillary in a Feburary 2010 article. [...]

by Tyler Durden Apr 1, 2017 7:09 PM The Russian central bank opened its first overseas office in Beijing on March 14, marking a step forward in forging a Beijing-Moscow alliance to bypass the US dollar in the global monetary system, and to phase-in a gold-backed standard of trade. According [...]

Evelyn Farkas admits that Trump Team was under Surveillance, “wiretapped” by Obama Administration!!!! EVELYN FARKAS: …that the Trump folks, if they found out how we knew what we knew about their, the staff, the Trump staff’s dealing with Russians, that they would try to compromise those sources and methods, meaning [...]

This month, Harvard Ph.D. Jerome Corsi of InfoWars (@jerome_corsi) and a CPA “who worked for two years for a major U.S. accounting firm as an outside auditor for Freddie Mac,” confirmed a 2012 scheme hatched by the Obama administration to funnel hundreds of billions in dividends from Government Sponsored Enterprises (GSE) Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to prop up the [...]

Authored by Don Quijones, Spain & Mexico, editor at Wolf Street Here’s Why Italy’s Banking Crisis Has Gone Off the Radar For a country that is on the brink of a gargantuan public bailout of its toxic-loan riddled banking sector, or failing that, a full-blown financial crisis that could bring [...]

As the Atlanta Journal Constitution points out today, the Trump administration has until May 22nd to decide whether they will continue to pursue the Obama administration’s appeal to provide subsidies to insurers who participate in the federal exchanges. Of course, any decision to remove those subsidies would likely result in [...]

Since 1985, the state has provided healthcare for retired teachers through a plan called TRS Care. As of last year, 261,500 retired teachers, dependents and their surviving spouses, according to the State Comptroller. But in recent years medical costs have risen higher than what the state contributes to TRS Care [...]

John Podesta, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s 2016 national campaign chairman, may have violated federal law by failing to disclose the receipt of 75,000 shares of stock from a Kremlin-financed company when he joined the Obama White House in 2014, according to the Daily Caller News Foundation’s Investigative Group. [...]

Authored by Charles Hugh-Smith via OfTwoMinds blog, No leader can reverse the dynamics of mutually reinforcing crises. Commentators seem split into three camps: those who see Trump as a manifestation of smouldering social/economic ills, those who see Trump and his supporters as the cause of those ills, and those who [...]

The story behind this Podesta-Russia link is explained in full gore by Mike Krieger via Liberty Blitzkrieg blog; dot connectors, Twitter diagram creators and newly minted Russia-conspiracy sleuths from sea to shining sea take note.   Since anything connected to Russia is now considered treasonous, I’ve got a great story [...]

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Despite endless streams of Fed Speakers proclaiming, in one form or another, that “we are at, or close to, full employment;” many in America – judging by the election of President Trump – are not feeling as exuberant as the jobs data implies they should be. The SF Fed itself [...]

Authored by MN Gordon via Acting-Man.com, Onward vs. Upward Something both unwanted and unexpected has tormented western economies in the 21st century.  Gross domestic product (GDP) has moderated onward while government debt has spiked upward.  Orthodox economists continue to be flummoxed by what has transpired.   What happened to the [...]

Along with the student loan debt bubble and other major financial factors, the looming pensions crisis is bound to be the death of us all. Because it’s based on a future promise to pay, it has long been a benefit dangled to solve strikes and union disputes – because, in [...]

Russia’s largest bank, Sberbank, has confirmed that it hired the consultancy of Tony Podesta, the elder brother of John Podesta who chaired Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign, for lobbying its interests in the United States and proactively seeking the removal of various Obama-era sanctions, the press service of the Russian institution [...]

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The New York Teamsters Road Carriers Local 707 Pension Fund has won the unfortunate award for “First Pension to Officially Run Out of Money.”  According to the New York Daily News, and a host of angry former truck drivers who’ve had their pension benefits slashed, the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corp. [...]

Humans beings appear to be hardwired to have a sense of fairness. This is puzzling from an evolutionary perspective, which you would have thought would mean we were predisposed to seek advantage for ourselves and our families wherever possible. But in fact a sense of fairness is important for humans [...]

Foreign and Defense Policy, Middle East, Terrorism Back in September, I testified before the House Financial Services Committee on the allegation that the Obama administration had paid Iran a ransom—at the time it was believed to be $400 million but it was later revealed that the figure was more than [...]

Democrats Pick A Racist To Head DNC Perez Dropped Voter Intimidation Charges Against Black Panthers Who Brought Weapons to a Polling Place…Perez Doesn’t Think White People Are Protected Under the Voting Rights Act An investigation into the Civil Rights Division by the Department of Justice’s inspector general revealed extreme views [...]

Submitted by Daniel Mitchell via The Foundation for Economic Education, Early last month, in a column on my hopes and fears for 2017, I fretted about fiscal chaos in Italy leading to default and bailouts. Simply stated, I fear that Italy, along with certain other “Club Med” nations, has passed [...]

  Once a past CO2 cycle was started, what was the limiting factor that ended that then current warming cycle? Why has there been no “runaway” warming previously as the past self-feeding cycle of co2 took control? Since CO2 historically is a trailing “indicator”, it is a dependent variable to [...]

The State Senate of Tennessee has laid the legislative groundwork for something that hasn’t been done in the United States of America since the Constitutional Convention of 1787 in Philadelphia.  With a vote of 27-3, the Tennessee Senate has voted to call a “convention of the states” in order to [...]

For the past several months we’ve warned that the taxpayers of the City of Dallas, despite all of the tough talk coming out of their elected city council members, would ultimately be forced to bail out the failing Dallas Police and Fire Pension (DPFP) system.  And just last night the [...]

This is How States Will Take Your Pension All emphasis ours written by Soren K and MarketSlant with contributions by Vince Lanci of Echobay.com Are you watching closely CT, IL, NJ etc? The table is now set for you to have your pension violated for the greater good. Are you [...]

Thousands of WordPress Sites Hacked Using Recently Disclosed Vulnerability Tuesday, February 07, 2017 Swati Khandelwal 21.4K 3037 1158 26.1K Last week, we reported about a critical zero-day flaw in WordPress that was silently patched by the company before hackers have had their hands on the nasty bug to exploit millions [...]

During a lively discussion centered on fears that President Trump is “trying to undermine the media,” MSNBC’s Mika Brzezinski let slip the awesome unspoken truth that the media’s “job” is to “actually control exactly what people think.”   SCARBOROUGH: “Exactly. That is exactly what I hear. What Yamiche said is [...]

Through the propaganda arm of the Democratic Party  (the major media, “fake news” providers) a narrative has emerged with the goal of foisting on the American people the idea that President Trump is in bed with Russia’s Putin plotting the destruction of America.. This is the definition of the lefts [...]

If you are celebrating the political damage Flynn’s resignation represents to President Trump, you should rethink what just happened. The attack and plan to remove Flynn, the so called investigation conducted by the CIA, FBI, and NSA, began as soon as it was apparent that Flynn would be NSA Advisor. [...]

Submitted by Shaun Bradley via TheAntiMedia.org, In the shadow of Donald Trump’s spree of controversial actions, the European commission has quietly launched the next offensive in the war on cash. These unelected bureaucrats have boldly asserted their intention to crack down on paper transactions across the E.U. and solidify a [...]

When Do We Begin To Hold The Teachers Union Accountable???   1. Table of the Day I (above) shows a comparison of some key statistics in 1980 and 2014 for public elementary and secondary schools in the US based on data from the National Center for Educational Statistics here. During [...]

Because It Is Wrong. The Facts::: Trump, or any president can ban Muslims or any other group of people. He can do so by asserting powers under the United States Code and the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952, which is the nation’s main immigration act. Under Title 8, Section [...]

There is a reason the Constitution vests “the executive power” in a single person, the president. To read it otherwise is to invite the kind of chaos in executing the nation’s laws that the founders were determined to avoid. Ms. Yates’ correct path was to resign, if she felt as [...]

China has been on a skyscraper-building boom for years, but, we suspect, 2016 may have seen the mal-investment boom jump the shark. As Goldman Sachs illustrates in the following chart, China was head, shoulders, knees, and toes above the aggregate of the rest of the world in terms of skyscraper [...]

The last 4 months have seen something ‘odd’ happen in Europe’s periphery. Sovereign ‘risk’ has conspicuously (and rationally) risen as macro-fundamentals have deteriorated – something that we have not seen since Draghi’s 2012 “whatever it takes” moment. For the first time since June 2015, Italian youth unemployment has risen above [...]

In order to sidestep and avoid Democratic obstruction with a Trump Supreme Court nominee; It is time Trump ordered Republicans Senators to employ  the “Constitutional Option” or Nuclear Option. The nuclear or constitutional option is a parliamentary procedure that allows the U.S. Senate to override a rule or precedent by a [...]

The ECB’s nationalization of the European corporate bond sector continues. In the ECB’s latest update, the six central banks acting on behalf of the Euro system provided an update on the list of corporate bonds they bought. They bought into 810 issuances with a total of €573bn in amount outstanding. [...]

Submitted by Charles Hugh-Smith via OfTwoMinds blog, How about moving the power to create money from the apex of the pyramid down to its lowest level? Let’s spend a moment deconstructing the word “capitalism.” Note it contains the word Capital. So far so good. Obviously the key concept here is [...]

I can understand the cost of healthcare rising as we have many new procedures and remedies that we are able to purchase. Healthcare that was not purchased 20 years ago. Cancer remedies, bionic joints. All of these are added purchases…What is responsible for the added cost of a K-12 and [...]

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Barack Obama Is Now The Only President In History To Never Have A Year Of 3% GDP Growth Following today’s extremely disappointing US GDP growth data, we have the final nail in the coffin of President Obama’s economic reign. Not only is the average annual growth rate of just 1.48% [...]