Time Magazine recently featured Sen. Rand Paul as one of the 100 most influential people in the world. He was not just on the list. Time placed Paul on its cover for the first, (though likely not for the last time). This may signal the emergence of the Libertarian Moment.
Janet Napolitano, Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, is on the list of potential Democratic presidential candidates compiled by the extraordinarily astute Prez16.com.
The GOP has relapsed into a potentially fatal business-as-usual complacency. The recommendations contained in its high profile but anodyne “autopsy” represent, at best, a band-aid for a party hemorrhaging from a much more fundamental wound: being out of touch with the needs, values, and dignity of the American people.
The gold price fell, dramatically, and now is bobbing about. Meanwhile, the prospects for implementing a 21st century gold standard continues to rise. Dramatically.
Marco Rubio came under intense fire from the Heritage Foundation last week for his stance in favor of a comprehensive immigration reform. Reform, as it must, includes a path to earn citizenship for illegal aliens who can prove themselves otherwise of good character.
Amid an ongoing decline in the price of gold, a major brawl recently broke out in the elite media over…the gold standard. What is this free-for-all all about? And why does it matter?
The Fiscal Cliff, the Sequester, and the Continuing Resolutions now are behind us. The next Episode in the Continuing Saga is looming: the Debt Ceiling. President Obama has put down his table ante...
Coming up next: a political Battle of Armageddon over repealing Obamacare. The Republicans are attempting to take the majority in the Senate. The Democrats ambitiously wish to take the majority in the House. All hangs on about two dozen races.
Americans just cast ballots for president, for the House, and for a third of the U.S. Senate, plus various local offices and referenda in our splendid Quadriennale. It is a moment for reflection … about our expectations of our elected officials. Our national political Narrative is fixated on the presidency while, Constitutionally, the House of Representatives is our key governing body. The presidency — as well as the campaign for that splendid star turn — turns out to be 90% theater and 10% substance.
Are central bankers about to embrace the real world? The events at most central banking conclaves are a total, excruciating, bore. The recent gathering of the Federal Reserve’s tribes at Jackson Hole, however, produced an elegant, compelling, presentation by rising star central banker Andy Haldane. Finally, a youth in the banquet hall declaring that the Emperor has no clothes.
One of the latent issues of the 2012 presidential race is a referendum on the Bernanke Fed. If Romney is in, Bernanke is out.
In the iconic movie Goldfinger the villain, Auric Goldfinger, pursues a nefarious scheme, code-named “Operation Grand Slam,” to contaminate America’s gold horde at Fort Knox, thereby leveraging the value of his own, uncontaminated, holdings.
As noted in last week’s column about the rising recognition by authorities in Germany about the virtues of gold, the gold standard is receiving impressive new recognition internationally. The GOP plank calling for a commission to study “possible ways to set a fixed value for the dollar” — with an unmistakable nod to gold — is the most prominent element of the 2012 GOP platform still being heard to “reverberate around the world.” Meanwhile, it continues to gain impressive momentum in the United States.
On September 18th, the London office of Deutsche Bank — one of the most respected banks in the world, and a bellwether of elite opinion — published a Global Markets Research paper entitled Gold: Adjusting for Zero. It was written by two esteemed, mainstream analysts Daniel Brebner and Xiao Fu.
One of the brightest stars in the free market galaxy is the work of the Hispanic American Center for Economic Research, HACER. HACER provides, among many other key services, a multilingual “Drudge Report” for free market news and opinion, crucial to nurturing the growing embrace of free markets.
Paul Krugman, in his New York Times column of August 24, "Galt, Gold and God," rails against an interest in the gold standard, which he attributes to Paul Ryan. Krugman lambastes Ryan, ironically enough, for an observation the latter made paraphrasing Keynes: "'There is nothing more insidious that a country can do to its citizens,' he intoned, 'than debase its currency.'"
A Saturday Evening Post reporter asked, in 1932, John Maynard Keynes if there had ever been anything like the Great Depression. Keynes replied, “Yes. It was called the Dark Ages and it lasted 400 years.” While the Great Recession is not so severe as was the Great Depression, it begins to appear that the world is enduring something that could be called “The Little Dark Age.”
The most interesting — because powerful and not widely anticipated — plank in the draft GOP Platform scheduled to be voted on tomorrow calls for, according to a Bloomberg, “creation of a commission to ‘consider the feasibility’ of returning the U.S. dollar to the gold standard ‘to set a fixed value’ for the currency.”
When Ronald Reagan was elected president the Dow Jones Industrial Average hovered around 1,000 (less than 2,800 inflation adjusted) — and had dipped, under President Carter, as low as 759. Unemployment stood at an unacceptable 7+%. The Soviet Union was aggressive, bellicose, and, in the eyes of the Western policy elite, could be but contained, not challenged. At the end of Reagan’s eight years in office, the Dow had tripled in value, on its way much higher. Job growth was vibrant. The USSR was well on its way to dissolution.
Welcome to the Wild West, 2012 style. The Feds to Tombstone: “If you want to fix your water line, better lawyer up and talk to President Obama.”
