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Senator Reid spins out, This is not the first time the IRS was used as a tool to target political opponents. (Thanks for the newsflash Senator, guess that makes it OK)
The IRS and the income tax are very powerful tools of coercion. Do I think the tactics employed against Tea Party groups recently would be employed by a big government “conservative” against groups which challenged his or her authority?
OF COURSE!!!
UK Independence Party makes big gains
Nigel Farage’s United kingdom Independent Party, or UKIP, has made big strides in recent local elections.
Much of the party’s success has come from the online presence of Mr. Farage and his unrelenting challenge to a European Union which is increasingly seen as not in the best interest of Britain. (Not to mention the Continent.)
To see what UK voters see in Mr. Farrage and his party I’ve attached a video I posted last year. It’s just so good.
View full post on AgainstCronyCapitalism.org
International News • Carbon bubble makes Australia’s coal industry ripe ‘for fin
Carbon bubble makes Australia’s coal industry ripe ‘for financial implosion’
Much of the nation’s coal reserves will be worthless if world’s governments fulfil pledge to cap emissions, warns report
Damian Carrington
guardian.co.uk, Sunday 28 April 2013
Australia is already the globe’s biggest coal exporter. s
Australia’s huge coal industry is a speculative bubble ripe for financial implosion if the world’s governments fulfil their agreement to act on climate change, according to a new report. The warning that much of the nation’s coal reserves will become worthless as the world hits carbon emission limits comes after banking giant Citi also warned Australian investors that fossil fuel companies could do little to avoid the future loss of value.
Australia is already the globe’s biggest coal exporter and "mega-mine" plans in Queensland for more extraction are identified as the world’s second biggest "carbon bomb" threatening runaway global warming.
"Investments in Australian coal rest on a speculative bubble of climate denial, indifference or dreaming," said John Connor, one of the new report’s authors and CEO of The Climate Institute, an independent research organisation based in Sydney. "Investors, governments and even some coal companies say they take climate change seriously, but this report shows they do not or are taking risky gambles."
James Leaton, at thinktank Carbon Tracker and also another of the report’s authors, said: "Investors need to challenge the assumption that coal demand will continue to rise in China and elsewhere, otherwise billions of dollars of taxpayer, superannuation and shareholder funds will be wasted in assets linked to unburnable carbon."
Carbon Tracker’s recent global report found that at least two-thirds of existing fossil fuel reserves will have to remain underground if the world is to meet existing internationally agreed targets to avoid the threshold for "dangerous" climate change. The new report shows Australian coal reserves owned by listed companies alone are equivalent to 25% of the global carbon budget for the fuel to 2050.
However, far from cutting back on exploration for new coal reserves, Australian listed companies spent AU$6bn on developing new deposits. If only half of potential future reserves were exploited, Australian coal would use up 75% of the global carbon budget for the fuel.
Earlier in April, Citi banking group issued a warning to investors in fossil fuel companies. "We see limited potential for engagement to alter the outcome in this case," concluded its report. "If the unburnable carbon [scenario] does occur – even with carbon capture and storage technology – it is difficult to see how the value of fossil fuel reserves can be maintained."
Leaton said China has indicated its coal use will peak in the next five years, but that this had not been priced by markets. "I don’t know why the market does not believe China. When it says it is going to do something, it usually does." Yet Australia is banking on selling coal to China: "That doesn’t add up."
The report, called "Australia’s carbon bubble", also warns that the nation’s politicians will have little control over events: "Tokyo and London have high exposure to Australian proven coal reserves. The decisions in overseas markets that will leave Australian assets stranded are beyond any Australian political control."
It also warned that as coal prices fell in future, Australia’s high costs of production leave its coal less competitive.
A separate report, also published on Monday, highlighted the opportunities available to Australia in joining other nations with big energy resources in transforming to a low-carbon economy.
"There are a lot of opportunities for Australia but the world is changing quickly and we need to be prepared," said Prof Tim Flannery, of the independent Climate Commission. "We are the 15th largest emitter in the world, larger than 180 other countries. We are more influential than most of us think."
"China is accelerating action. After years of strong growth in coal use, this has begun to level off. They have an impressive array of [climate] actions that will drive global momentum in the future," he said. "Renewable energy is surging globally with solar PV capacity increasing 42% and wind 21% in just one year. With so much global momentum this is clearly the beginning of the clean energy era."
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2 … l-industry
Statistics: Posted by yoda — Mon Apr 29, 2013 12:18 am
View full post on opinions.caduceusx.com
The More Illegal Immigrants That Go On Food Stamps The More Money JP Morgan Makes
Recently uncovered documents prove that the Obama administration has been working with the Mexican government to increase the number of illegal immigrants on food stamps, and when more illegal immigrants go on food stamps JP Morgan makes more money. As you will read about below, JP Morgan has made at least 560 million dollars processing Electronic Benefits Transfer cards. Each month, JP Morgan makes between $.31 and $2.30 for every single person on food stamps (and that does not even include things like ATM fees, etc). So JP Morgan has a vested interest in seeing poverty grow and the number of people on food stamps increase. Meanwhile, the Obama administration has been aggressively seeking to expand participation in the food stamp program. Under Obama, the number of people on food stamps has grown from 32 million to more than 47 million. And even though poverty in America is absolutely exploding, that apparently is not good enough for the Obama administration. It has now come out that the U.S. Department of Agriculture has provided the Mexican government with literature that actively encourages illegal immigrants to enroll in food stamps. One flyer contains the following statement in Spanish: “You need not divulge information regarding your immigration status in seeking this benefit for your children.” The bold and the underlining are in the original document in case you were wondering. Overall, federal spending on food stamps increased from 18 billion dollars in 2000 to 85 billion dollars in 2012, and at this point one out of every five U.S. households in now enrolled in the food stamp program. When people illegally or fraudulently enroll in the food stamp program, it makes it harder for those that desperately need the help to be able to get it.
It is certainly a good thing to help fellow Americans that are suffering. It is a crying shame that more than a million public school students in America are homeless. That should not be happening in the “wealthiest nation on earth”.
But today we have a system that has turned poverty into big business. According to an article posted on Breitbart.com, JP Morgan has made at least 560 million dollars (and probably much more) processing EBT cards…
A new report by the Government Accountability Institute finds that JP Morgan has made at least $560,492,596 since 2004 processing the Electronic Benefits Transfer (EBT) cards of 18 of the 24 states it has under contract for the food stamp program.
A Daily Beast article provided some more specifics about the monster profits that JP Morgan is making…
Just how lucrative JP Morgan’s EBT state contracts are is hard to say, because total national data on EBT contracts are not reported. But thanks to a combination of public-records requests and contracts that are available online, here’s what we do know: 18 of the 24 states JP Morgan handles have been contracted to pay the bank up to $560,492,596.02 since 2004. Since 2007, Florida has been contracted to pay JP Morgan $90,351,202.22. Pennsylvania’s seven-year contract totaled $112,541,823.27. New York’s seven-year contract totaled $126,394,917.
These contracts are transactional contracts, meaning they are amendable based on changes in program participation. Each month, the three companies that administer EBT receive a small fee that can range from $.31 to $2.30 (or higher depending upon the number of welfare services on an EBT card and state contractual requirements) for each SNAP recipient.
So the more people that are out of work and that need to turn to the government for food, the bigger profits that JP Morgan makes.
What makes all of this even more insulting is that many of the jobs that JP Morgan could be providing to Americans to help alleviate this poverty are being shipped overseas instead. As I noted in a previous article, many EBT card customer service calls are being routed to call centers in India by JP Morgan.
So why doesn’t anyone do anything about this?
Well, it turns out that JP Morgan has the politicians that oversee the food stamp program in their back pocket. The following is from a recent Money Morning article…
And the bank has taken steps to make sure the SNAP program remains a growing source of revenue. JPMorgan’s political donations to the members of House and Senate agricultural committees, the ones with legislative responsibility for the program, soared from just over $82,000 in 2002 to nearly $333,000 as of 2010.
What a wonderful system we have, eh?
And surely JP Morgan just loves the fact that the Obama administration is actively encouraging illegal immigrants to apply for food stamps.
What you are about to read should absolutely shock you. At a time when the U.S. government is absolutely drowning in debt, the Obama administration is making it abundantly clear to illegal immigrants that their immigration status will not be checked when they apply for food stamps. The following is from a recent Judicial Watch press release…
Judicial Watch today released documents detailing how the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) is working with the Mexican government to promote participation by illegal aliens in the U.S. food stamp program.
The promotion of the food stamp program, now known as “SNAP” (Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program), includes a Spanish-language flyer provided to the Mexican Embassy by the USDA with a statement advising Mexicans in the U.S. that they do not need to declare their immigration status in order to receive financial assistance. Emphasized in bold and underlined, the statement reads, “You need not divulge information regarding your immigration status in seeking this benefit for your children.”
The documents came in response to a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request made to USDA on July 20, 2012. The FOIA request sought: “Any and all records of communication relating to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) to Mexican Americans, Mexican nationals, and migrant communities, including but not limited to, communications with the Mexican government.”
The documents obtained by Judicial Watch show that USDA officials are working closely with their counterparts at the Mexican Embassy to widely broaden the SNAP program in the Mexican immigrant community, with no effort to restrict aid to, identify, or apprehend illegal immigrants who may be on the food stamp rolls.
You can see a copy of the flyer right here.
So who pays for all of this?
You do of course.
The Obama administration is doing all that it can to promote illegal immigration, and big banks such as JP Morgan just make bigger profits the more illegal immigration that we see, but it is you and I that end up with the bill. This was put beautifully in a recent article by Mike Adams of NaturalNews.com…
Nearly $75 billion of taxpayer money is spent each year on federal food stamps, and it turns out some of that is alarmingly being handed out to illegal immigrants — people who contribute nothing to the federal tax base in America but who seem to be experts on collecting social welfare benefits of all kinds. If you are working for a living, you are buying food for illegals who are being actively recruited by Obama and the democratic party so that they will vote more democrats into office.
When we reward illegal immigration, what happens?
That’s right – we are just going to get even more illegal immigration.
According to WND, we have already started seeing a huge increase in illegal immigrants coming across the border since Congress began debating the amnesty bill…
Illegal border crossings have doubled, and possibly even tripled, since the latest congressional push began toward comprehensive immigration reform.
In reporting first published by Townhall.com’s Katie Pavlich, border patrol agents in the Tucson/Nogales sector claim illegals are coming here in much higher numbers in just the past few months.
“We’ve seen the number of illegal aliens double, maybe even triple since amnesty talk started happening,” an unnamed border agent said to Townhall. The data from Customs and Border Protection cited in the report shows 504 illegals were detected crossing in that sector between Feb. 5 and March 1. Only 189 were caught on camera, and just 174 of the 504 were apprehended. Of those spotted on camera, 32 were carrying huge packs believed to contain drugs and several were heavily armed.
If that bill is passed, it is being projected that it will bring 33 million more people into this country…
The pending Senate immigration bill would bring a minimum of 33 million people into the country during its first decade of operation, according to an analysis by NumbersUSA, a group that wants to slow the current immigration rate.
By 2024, the inflow would include an estimated 9.2 million illegal immigrants, plus 2.5 million illegals who arrived as children — dubbed ‘Dreamers’ — plus roughly 3.4 million company-sponsored employees with university degrees, said the unreleased analysis.
The majority of the inflow, or roughly 17 million people, would consist of family members of illegals, recent immigrants and of company-sponsored workers, according to the NumbersUSA analysis provided to The Daily Caller.
We have made legal immigration a complete and total nightmare while leaving the back door completely wide open at the same time.
We greatly punish those who are trying to do things legally while at the same time we are greatly rewarding those that are cheating the system.
What kind of sense does that make?
Shouldn’t we insist that everyone come in through the front door?
Those that are coming over our borders illegally know what the score is…
Linda Vickers, who owns a ranch in Brooks County, which is Ground Zero for the immigration debate, pins the blame directly on talk of ‘amnesty’ and a ‘path to citizenship’ for people who entered the U.S. illegally.
She recalls one man being arrested on her ranch not long ago.
“The Border Patrol agent was loading one man up, and he told the officer in Spanish, ‘Obama’s gonna let me go’.”
Border Patrol agents report that immigrants are crossing the border, and in some cases surrendering while asking, “Where do I go for my amnesty?”
We are already becoming a poverty-stricken nation. We simply can’t afford to feed millions upon millions of illegal immigrants as well.
As I write this, the U.S. national debt is $16,758,107,082,298.63.
We now have a debt to GDP ratio of about 105 percent.
In the United States today, the amount of money that is deposited in our banks is about 9.3 trillion dollars. If we took every penny of that and used it to pay off the national debt, we would still owe more than 7 trillion dollars.
We are stealing more than 100 million dollars from future generations of Americans every single hour of every single day to pay our bills, and yet everyone seems to think that this is “normal” somehow.
The truth is that what we are doing is absolutely criminal, and we should all be ashamed.
For much more on our exploding national debt, please see the following article: “55 Facts About The Debt And U.S. Government Finances That Every American Voter Should Know“.
In the end, it should be apparent to everyone that our system is failing. Our government is corrupt, our big banks are consumed with greed and most average Americans are so addicted to entertainment that they have absolutely no idea what is going on.
What would those that bled and died for this country think about what we have become today?
View full post on The Economic Collapse
Ed Glaeser Makes Lamentably Rare Case for the Freedom to Trade
Sallie James
Support for free trade, especially from politicians, often rests on tired mercantalist arguments about the benefits of exports and jobs. That can backfire, as we’ve seen recently with trade figures showing that the U.S. trade deficit with Korea has widened since the Korea-U.S. Free Trade Agreement came into force. That’s why I’ve argued that relying on rhetoric about all the exports and jobs that free(r) trade will create is a dangerous game: where, might trade skeptics ask, are all those exports you promised us, and why should we support trade liberalization if the results we were promised don’t materialize? So I was thrilled today to see a small post on Bloomberg.com from Harvard economics professor Ed Glaeser calling for the president to make a strong push for a U.S.-EU trade agreement, because of the benefits it would bring U.S. companies and consumers:
He should use his address to make the U.S. a leading voice once again for economic freedom: the freedom of consumers to buy European goods and the freedom of producers to sell their goods on the other side of the Atlantic.
It is gratifying to see a principled case for free trade, resting on a foundation of freedom, in the media. Here’s hoping President Obama read Professor Glaeser’s article, and heeds his advice.
View full post on Cato @ Liberty
Other • “If that makes us cockroaches, we can certainly live with t
“If that makes us cockroaches, we can certainly live with the label.”
by SIMON BLACK on DECEMBER 11, 2012
December 10, 2012
London, England
[Editor's Note: Tim Price, Director of Investment at PFP Wealth Management and frequent Sovereign Man contributor, is filling in for Simon today.]
Clearly, investing is a probabilistic endeavour. There are no certainties to speak of. We can only operate on the basis of rational analysis and prudent, considered risk.
That, in turn, presumes that free financial markets are being allowed to operate. But they are not… not in the case of government debt markets, at any rate.
Cash-strapped, heavily indebted western governments are rigging the bond markets for their own ends. They are keeping borrowing costs artificially low by coercing banks and pension schemes to hold government debt through financial repression.
Their agents, in the form of central banks under their direct or indirect control, are willfully cooperating in this scam. If private sector companies operated in this way in the management of their own debt, their chief executives would end up in a prison cell.
One really cannot trust the price and yield signals from the government bond markets of the world (notably those of the egregiously indebted western economies).
One of the key problems in financial markets, however, is that they tend to be populated by specialists, expert or otherwise, whose entire careers (and compensation structures) are dominated by a single asset class.
Just as Warren Buffett has pointed out that you don’t go to a barber asking if you need a haircut, we should not be surprised that professional bond specialists see no particular evidence of a bubble in the one asset class that remunerates them.
The most dangerous advice that this writer considers he ever received was as a bond salesman at Merrill Lynch in the late 1990s (a place that dispensed plenty of dangerous advice in its own right): to thrive, one should specialize.
We didn’t buy that advice then, and we don’t buy it now. Rather than being expert specialists, we would much rather try to be competent generalists. And further, we would argue that there are insufficient generalists operating in the capital markets.
While a constrained specialist will cling to the bull story in debt, and unconstrained generalist will consider all sides… and consider other asset classes, in particular real assets.
On the subject, Dylan Grice wrote a paean of praise to the humble cockroach in his farewell letter to clients of his erstwhile employer, French bank SocGen:
The oldest cockroach fossil is 350 million years old, which is quite remarkable when you think about it. We humans have been around for around for a mere fifty thousand years (so we’re one seven thousandth as successful as cockroaches).
According to the record of the rocks, cockroaches first appeared just after the second of the earth’s five mass extinctions (defined as the loss of 75% of all species). In other words, that means they survived the third, fourth and fifth mass extinctions which followed, the last one being the Cretaceous event which wiped out the dinosaurs.
They can go without air for 45 minutes, survive submerged underwater for half an hour, survive freezing temperatures and withstand fifteen times more radiation than humans. They eat pretty much anything, including the glue on the back of stamps. And when that runs out, they can last a month without anything at all before finally starving.
Cockroaches may not be able to build nuclear bombs. But they can withstand nuclear war. They survive. Don’t get me wrong. Thriving is great. Prospering isn’t bad either. But neither mean much if you’re unable to survive.
Applying this view to investing, Grice goes on to suggest that a cockroach’s portfolio “would be inflation resistant, deflation resistant, credit inflation resistant, credit deflation resistant… despite having ‘no view’ on which scenario was more likely at any one point in time.” In short, a generalist approach.
It should be clear to any longstanding readers that we nurse grave fears for the future. So we have, at least, two choices–
We can vote in favor of the asset specialists who, putting the wrong end of the telescope to a blind eye, suggest that there are no problems ahead, and no bubbles visible.
Or we can vote in favor of a somewhat generalist strategy that allocates to a diversified array of disparate asset types (creditworthy bonds, defensive equities, real assets, uncorrelated funds) and that then attempts to pick value in those dusty, neglected corners where it might exist.
We are more worried about risk than we are greedy for return. And if that makes us cockroaches, we can certainly live with the label.
http://www.sovereignman.com/finance/if- … bel-10201/
Statistics: Posted by yoda — Tue Dec 11, 2012 11:15 am
View full post on opinions.caduceusx.com
Is the Federal Government Bound by the Agreements It Makes With States?
By Ilya Shapiro
The Interstate Agreement on Detainers, a compact authorized by federal statute, provides a simple procedure for transferring custody of prisoners between states. Because the federal government annually seeks to prosecute thousands of prisoners already in state custody, it joined the IAD in 1970 to get the benefit of this unified procedure. When it joined, it did so as a “state” for purposes of the agreement, and exempted itself from only two provisions (which aren’t relevant here). One of the provisions that the federal government decided not to exempt itself from, Article IV(a), allows the governor of the sending state to deny any request made by a receiving state to transfer a prisoner.
In September of 2010, Jason Pleau offered to plead guilty to robbery and murder charges in Rhode Island in exchange for life in prison without parole, the harshest sentence that state’s law allows. Pleau’s crimes also allegedly violated federal law, however, and the U.S. government wanted to prosecute Pleau itself in order to seek the death penalty. The federal government thus sought custody through the IAD by filing for the little-known writ of habeas corpus ad prosequendum (“show me the body for prosecution”).
The governor of Rhode Island, Lincoln Chafee, disapproves of the death penalty and used his authority under the IAD’s Article IV(a) to deny the federal request. A federal district court, later affirmed by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit, overruled Chafee’s denial, stating that the Supremacy Clause prevented the governor from interfering with the federal government’s wishes.
The First Circuit found that the compact’s specific text and the normal canons of statutory construction were “all beside the point.” According to the court, what was important was that Congress could not possibly have meant to grant state governors the power to deny federal transfer requests—and thus the IAD didn’t affect the balance of power between the federal government and the states. The First Circuit thus granted the writ, and Pleau is now in federal custody.
The question presented here, whether the Supremacy Clause trumps a governor’s right to deny a request for transfer of custody under the IAD, raises two important issues: First, if the First Circuit is right, then the federal government may reap the benefit of interstate bargains without having to fulfill its own obligations under them. Second, the First Circuit’s opinion effectively treats the state courts as inferior to the federal courts, which upsets the system of concurrent sovereignty that the Founders designed.
Cato has joined the Independence Institute to file an amicus brief urging the U.S. Supreme Court to hear this case, with a focus on the second issue. We argue that the U.S. legal system has always recognized the dual sovereignty of federal and state courts, dating back to Chief Justice John Marshall. As Chief Justice Marshall explained, that dual system requires that state courts not be considered inferior to federal courts, and thus federal courts have no independent authority to order prisoners under state jurisdiction to be transferred to the federal system.
Furthermore, when abrogating state sovereignty via the Supremacy Clause, Congress must demonstrate its intent to do so with “unmistakably clear language”—and none of the statutes applicable here contain any such language. Finally, we argue that the First Circuit has misinterpreted relevant Supreme Court precedent and that a proper reading of the relevant case law would establish that a state is well within its rights to treat the federal government like any other state under the IAD and deny its request to transfer a prisoner into federal custody.
The Supreme Court will decide whether to take up the case of Chafee v. United States and Pleau v. United States later this fall.
Is the Federal Government Bound by the Agreements It Makes With States? is a post from Cato @ Liberty – Cato Institute Blog
View full post on Cato @ Liberty
QE3: Helicopter Ben Bernanke Makes It Rain Money
You can’t accuse Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke of not living up to his nickname. Back in 2002, Bernanke delivered a speech entitled “Deflation: Making Sure ‘It’ Doesn’t Happen Here” in which he referenced a statement by economist Milton Friedman about fighting deflation by dropping money from a helicopter. Well, it might be time for a new nickname for Bernanke because what he did today was a lot more than drop money from a helicopter. Today the Federal Reserve announced that QE3 will begin on Friday, but it is going to be much different from QE1 and QE2. Both of those rounds of quantitative easing were of limited duration. This time, the quantitative easing is going to be open-ended. The Fed is going to buy 40 billion dollars worth of mortgage-backed securities per month until they have decided that the economy is in good enough shape to stop. For those that get confused by terms like “quantitative easing” and “mortgage-backed securities”, what the Federal Reserve is essentially saying is this: “We’re going to print a bunch of money and buy stuff for as long as we feel it is necessary.” In addition, the Federal Reserve has promised to keep interest rates at ultra-low levels all the way through mid-2015. The course that the Federal Reserve has set us on is utter insanity. Ben Bernanke can rain money down on us all he wants, but it is not going to do much at all to help the real economy. However, it will definitely hasten the destruction of the U.S. dollar.
And the Federal Reserve is apparently very eager to get QE3 going. Purchases of mortgage-backed securities are going to start on Friday.
In the coming months, hundreds of billions of dollars that the Federal Reserve has zapped into existence out of nothing will be injected into our financial system.
So what will happen to all of this new money?
If banks and financial institutions use that money to make loans then it could have somewhat of a positive impact on the economy in the short-term.
However, the truth is that it isn’t as if banks are hurting for cash to loan out. In fact, right now banks are already sitting on $1.6 trillion in excess reserves. Just like with the first two rounds of quantitative easing, a lot of the money from QE3 will likely end up being put on the shelf.
But the stock market loved the news because they know that the previous two rounds of quantitative easing have been great for the financial markets. On Thursday, the stock market soared to levels not seen since December 2007.
There is much rejoicing on Wall Street right now.
And this stock market bounce is great for Bernanke’s good buddy Barack Obama.
Obama nominated Bernanke to a second term as Fed Chairman, and this might be Bernanke’s way of paying him back.
But of course the Fed is supposed to be “above politics” so that would never happen, right?
The Federal Reserve essentially “crossed the Rubicon” today. No longer will quantitative easing be considered an “emergency measure”. Rather, it will now be considered just another “tool” that the Fed uses in the normal course of business.
Considering how vulnerable the U.S. dollar already is, announcing an “open-ended” round of quantitative easing is utter foolishness. According to the Fed, when you add the 40 billion dollars of new mortgage-backed security purchases per month to all of the other “easing” measures the Fed is continuing to do, the grand total is going to come to about 85 billion dollars a month. The following is from the statement that the Fed released earlier today….
To support a stronger economic recovery and to help ensure that inflation, over time, is at the rate most consistent with its dual mandate, the Committee agreed today to increase policy accommodation by purchasing additional agency mortgage-backed securities at a pace of $40 billion per month. The Committee also will continue through the end of the year its program to extend the average maturity of its holdings of securities as announced in June, and it is maintaining its existing policy of reinvesting principal payments from its holdings of agency debt and agency mortgage-backed securities in agency mortgage-backed securities. These actions, which together will increase the Committee’s holdings of longer-term securities by about $85 billion each month through the end of the year, should put downward pressure on longer-term interest rates, support mortgage markets, and help to make broader financial conditions more accommodative.
The Committee will closely monitor incoming information on economic and financial developments in coming months. If the outlook for the labor market does not improve substantially, the Committee will continue its purchases of agency mortgage-backed securities, undertake additional asset purchases, and employ its other policy tools as appropriate until such improvement is achieved in a context of price stability. In determining the size, pace, and composition of its asset purchases, the Committee will, as always, take appropriate account of the likely efficacy and costs of such purchases.
So what does all of this mean?
I really like how one analyst put it when he described this announcement as a “I’m gonna ease till your eyes bleed kinda statement“.
The Fed also promised to keep interest rates at “exceptionally low levels” until mid-2015….
To support continued progress toward maximum employment and price stability, the Committee expects that a highly accommodative stance of monetary policy will remain appropriate for a considerable time after the economic recovery strengthens. In particular, the Committee also decided today to keep the target range for the federal funds rate at 0 to 1/4 percent and currently anticipates that exceptionally low levels for the federal funds rate are likely to be warranted at least through mid-2015.
It seems that whenever the U.S. economy gets into trouble, Bernanke and his friends at the Fed only have one prescription and it goes something like this….
“Print more money and promise to keep interest rates near zero even longer.”
Of course a lot of Republicans are quite disturbed that QE3 was announced with just a couple of months remaining in a very heated election battle.
Even big news organizations such as CNBC are commenting on this….
Though the Fed is ostensibly politically independent, the decision comes at a ticklish time with the presidential election less than two months away.
And without a doubt the mainstream media will be proclaiming this to be “good news” for the economy in the short-term.
But is QE3 really going to help the average person on the street?
Well, first let’s take a look at employment. We are told that one of the primary reasons for QE3 is jobs.
But did QE1 and QE2 create jobs?
The answer is clearly no.
As you can see from the chart below, the percentage of working age Americans with a job fell dramatically during the last recession and has not bounced back since that time despite all of the quantitative easing that has been done already….
So why try the same thing again when it did not work the first two times?
But what more quantitative easing is likely to do is to pump up stock market values because a lot of the money from QE3 is going to end up being put into stocks and other investments.
This is going to help the wealthy get even wealthier, and it is going to make the “wealth gap” between the rich and the poor even larger in America.
QE3 is also probably going to cause commodity prices to rise just like QE1 and QE2 did.
That means that you will be paying more for gasoline, food and other basic necessities.
So there may not be more jobs, but at least you will get the privilege of paying more for things.
The inflation that QE3 will cause will be particularly cruel for those on fixed incomes such as retirees.
None of the extra money from QE3 is going to go into their pockets, but they will have to pay more to heat their homes and fill up their shopping carts.
And the “exceptionally low interest rate” policy of the Federal Reserve is absolutely devastating for those that have saved for retirement and that are relying on interest income for their living expenses.
In short, quantitative easing is very good for the wealthy and it is very bad for the average man and woman on the street.
But what else would you expect from the Federal Reserve?
It is imperative that we educate the American people about the Federal Reserve and about how they are destroying our economy. For much more on this, please see my previous article entitled “10 Things That Every American Should Know About The Federal Reserve“.
Perhaps the biggest danger from QE3 is that it could greatly hasten the day when the U.S. dollar ceases to be the reserve currency of the world.
The rest of the world is not stupid. They see that the Federal Reserve is now firing up the printing presses whenever they feel like it. They can see the games that we are playing with our currency.
Why should the rest of the world continue to use the U.S. dollar to trade with one another when the United States is constantly debasing it and playing games with its value?
As I wrote about the other day, China and Russia have been calling for a new reserve currency for the world for several years. They have been leading the charge to conduct international trade in currencies other than the U.S. dollar, and I have documented many of the major international agreements to move away from the U.S. dollar that have been made in the last couple of years.
The status of the U.S. dollar in the world has already been steadily slipping, and now Helicopter Ben Bernanke pulls this kind of nonsense.
We are handing the rest of the world an excuse to abandon the U.S. dollar on a silver platter.
And when the rest of the globe rejects the U.S. dollar as a reserve currency, the dollar will crash, the cost of living will increase dramatically, our standard of living will go way down and we will never fully recover from it.
So if you think that things are “bad” now, just wait until that happens.
The U.S. dollar is one of the best things that the U.S. economy still has going for it, and Helicopter Ben Bernanke is doing his best to absolutely destroy that.
What is your opinion of QE3? Please feel free to post a comment with your thoughts below….
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Getting Class Action Rules Right Makes Markets More Efficient
By Ilya Shapiro
Getting the rules governing class actions right means balancing the need to keep the courthouse door open for legal claims not lucrative enough to pursue individually with the need to prevent wholesale extortion by opportunistic would-be plaintiffs (and their lawyers) who know that the settlement values of class actions are generally much larger than those of individual lawsuits.
In its recent (2011) decision in Wal-Mart v. Dukes, the Supreme Court reiterated that when considering whether to certify a lawsuit as a class action (which aggregates presumptive claims from a national “class” of plaintiffs), a trial court must conduct a “rigorous analysis” to determine that the putative plaintiffs satisfy the key requirements of Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 23: (1) the class is so large that each potential plaintiff can’t join the suit individually (“numerosity”); (2) questions of law or fact are common to the class (“commonality”); and (3) the claims/defenses of the plaintiff representatives are typical of the class as a whole (“typicality”). Despite Dukes, many courts have fallen back on a misinterpretation of an earlier Supreme Court decision, Eisen v. Carlisle & Jacquelin, to hold that a court can’t consider at the class-certification stage any issue that will overlap with the merits of the case.
In Comcast v. Behrend, the Philadelphia-based U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit affirmed the district court’s certification of a class of nearly two million past and present Comcast cable customers in an antitrust action against the company. In certifying the class, the district court refused to evaluate the admissibility of testimony presented by plaintiffs’ expert witness regarding the ability to calculate class-wide damages, considering such an inquiry to go to the merits of the case. The court thus failed to conduct “rigorous analysis” with respect to that issue, and so the Supreme Court decided to review whether a class can be certified without first determining, as part of the Dukes analysis, whether a plaintiff’s methodology for calculating damages is admissible.
Cato has filed an amicus brief urging the Court to clarify that what it meant in Dukes was that a full inquiry into the reliability and admissibility of expert testimony (a so-called Daubert inquiry) is required at the class-certification stage. A lower standard would obviously prejudice defendants because class certification “magnifies and strengthens the number of unmeritorious claims” and creates “insurmountable pressure on defendants to settle.” But it would also prejudice absent class members because certification based on inadmissible evidence may distort their perception of the likelihood of success and encourage the members to stay in the class. Since all class members who don’t opt out of the class are ultimately bound by a class action judgment, there’s a large potential for harm to these potentially valid claims as well.
The only way to sufficiently protect the interests of defendants and absent class members, as well as to stay faithful to the basic commonality requirement of Rule 23 — which balances the overall social interests described above — is for the Supreme Court to reverse the Third Circuit and clarify that the Daubert standard applies at the class-certification stage, not just at trial.
The Supreme Court will hear the case of Comcast v. Behrend on November 5.
Getting Class Action Rules Right Makes Markets More Efficient is a post from Cato @ Liberty – Cato Institute Blog
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Technology and the Internet • Microsoft Makes Job Cuts
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UPDATE: Microsoft Makes Job Cuts; Advertising Hit But Details Sparse
Jul 11, 2012 at 7:03pm ET by Pamela Parker
Microsoft has undertaken what’s being called “a round of layoffs,” including eliminating the position of long-time digital marketing evangelist Mel Carson, who worked for Microsoft Advertising in the US and helped start adCenter in the UK.
The software giant confirmed the layoffs but won’t say how many people or what departments were involved.
A Microsoft spokesperson send us a written statement saying:
“I can confirm that there were job eliminations today at Microsoft. Like any company, Microsoft continually evaluates its operations and works to align the business to key priorities. I can assure you we’re thinking about the exciting new opportunities that Windows 8, Xbox and Skype present for our advertising and marketing partners.”
What initiatives are rising as “key priorities” and which are being downsized is unclear. Another unanswered question is about the geographies involved in the job cuts. We’re trying to get additional information from Microsoft, and will update as appropriate.
Carson, who first wrote about the layoffs in his personal blog, is well known in the search marketing industry, where he’s been seen as an effective advocate for Microsoft. He’s spoken widely at digital marketing, search and social media conferences, and has been a presence on the Microsoft Advertising Blog.
http://searchengineland.com/microsoft-m … rse-127453
Statistics: Posted by yoda — Wed Jul 11, 2012 10:59 pm
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