August 23rd was a big news day all over the world. The western media’s focus on the events of that day was solidly on the unproven claims that Russian President Vladimir Putin was behind the sabotage or shooting down of an executive jet that killed his former associate Yevgeny Prigozhin.
In reality, however, there was a far more important story that was coming out of South Africa. In fact, Putin had a far more important job to do on that day due to his desire to make progress in stripping the United States of its dollar hegemony. Putin was engaged by videolink in the discussions taking place in Johannesburg regarding expanding the so-called BRICS monetary union, in part to include measures that would diminish the dominance of the dollar in the world economy. Continue reading
How far would you go to feed your family? Hopefully that is a question that you will not have to answer any time soon, but right now we are seeing millions upon millions of people become more desperate as economic conditions rapidly deteriorate and food costs soar. At this point, most Americans are just barely scraping by from month to month, and in poorer countries on the other side of the world there are people that are literally starving to death. As I have detailed previously, the UN has reported that 2.4 billion people did not have enough food to eat last year, and 900 million of them were facing severe food insecurity.
As I look at the incredible numbers we see in our nation’s budget, it becomes readily apparent that this is a shipwreck looking for a reef to hit and unsustainable as all hell. It has to be in their plans to destroy the economy. There’s just no other sound or sane explanation for it.
The US dollar has been the de-facto world reserve currency for more than half a century, with no questions asked about the greenback’s exceptionalism. However, the Ukraine war potentially begets an inflection point wherein nations are endeavoring for a multipolar world. Countries are now increasingly finding an alternative to settle trades in other currencies. 
It feels like a silly thing to say, but board games are not real life. Playing a few rounds of Operation does not make you a surgeon. Unlike in Battleship, real-world battleships do not sit still on a ten-by-ten grid. 
Growing optimism that the U.S. economy can avoid a severe recession even as the Federal Reserve maintains its hawkish bias continues to weigh on the gold market as prices trade near a six-month low.
The price of a McDonald’s hamburger in the United States has inflated 3.75 percent annually over the last seventy years. McDonald’s has grown from a tiny hamburger stand in Des Plaines, Illinois, to the second largest fast-food chain on earth. Scale economies alone (never mind process and productivity improvements) should’ve allowed the price of a burger to decline materially over this period.
Little by little, pharmacy benefit managers (PBMs) are getting their comeuppance and American consumers are getting their due when it comes to the cost of prescription drugs.
