The United States of America seems to have a suicide wish as it wanders aimlessly down a continually narrowing path that can only lead to national ruin. Is this a premeditated act of self-annihilation or simply a series of foolish choices? Before a nation can be effectively destroyed from within it is necessary first that…
Modern fractional reserve banking is ultimately a confidence game. If lenders or depositors are confident their bank is solvent, it stands. If confidence is broken, that historically leads to bank panics, deposit runs and domino collapse of a financial system or worse. The surprise collapse in late May of a small Inner-Mongolia Chinese bank, Baoshang,…
Tensions in the Persian Gulf are reaching a point of no return. In recent weeks,six oil tankers have been subjected to Israeli sabotage disguised to look like Iranian attacks to induce the United States to take military action against the Islamic Republic. Some days ago Iran rightfully shot out of the sky a US Drone. In…
During the lengthy discussions which led to the 1944 Bretton Woods Agreement, economist John Maynard Keynes opposed fixed exchanged rates via-a-vis a gold backed US dollar. He instead proposed the creation of a super-national unit of account which he called the bancor. The justification behind a seemingly tedious accounting unit which could be purchased in…
In recent days Sweden’s largest mortgage bank, Swedbank, fired its CEO amid charges she was involved in a multi-billion dollar money laundering operation. Swedbank now joins Denmark’s largest bank, Danske Bank, and several other European Union banks implicated in laundering what has been claimed amounts to more than $1 trillion in funds of Russian or…
Like a gilded coating that makes the dullest things glitter, today’s thin veneer of political populism covers a grotesque underbelly of growing inequality that’s hiding in plain sight. And this phenomenon of ever more concentrated wealth and power has both Newtonian and Darwinian components to it. In terms of Newton’s first law of motion: those…
