Many are claiming that this time will be different than the last. This should concern just about everyone
For as often as the phrase “history repeats itself” is used, it’s shocking how rare it is for mankind to actually learn from its mistakes. This year marks a decade since the housing crisis rocked the American economy to its core. Its implications were so far-reaching, many are still recovering from the devastation today, making it all the more frustrating that few seem to have learned any sort of lesson from the not-so-distant collapse. Continue reading
This teetering edifice of debt is going to collapse, and they know it.
People like the welfare state because they suppose that it comes at no costs and provides many benefits. If people knew how much the present consumption of social benefits entails less prosperity in the future, the population would have a critical attitude towards the welfare state and politicians would have a harder time selling their fraud. Just as a society that ranks security over liberty loses both, a society that attributes a higher value to social benefits than to wealth creation ends up with neither wealth nor benefits. 
In the 1190s Genghis Khan extended a practice that changed the world: A new payment transaction system, paper money. This was introduced to the west via Marco Polo and is the primary root to the paper money we have today. The story of Marco Polo’s adventure can be found in the classic 1299 manuscript, “The Book of the Marvels of the World” by Rustichello da Pisafrom stories told by Marco Polo. Marco discovered that Genghis molded his empire through might, force and “the bark of trees”. It was the “bark of trees” that single handedly changed the way the west viewed payments and transactions. 
The economic numbers just continue to get worse and worse, and at this point it has become exceedingly clear that an economic slowdown is happening. In fact, even the chair of the Federal Reserve is using the term “slowdown” to describe what is taking place. But of course many are still hoping that the U.S. economy can pull out of this slump and avoid the sort of crippling recession that we experienced in 2008. Unfortunately, that may be really tough because the entire global economy is slowing down right now. Our world is more interconnected than ever before, and what happens on one side of the planet is invariably going to affect the other side of the planet. Some parts of the globe are already mired in deep economic problems, and the U.S. appears to be following down the same path. 
I know that the headline sounds outrageous, but it is actually true. According to a brand new report that was just released, Americans had to borrow 88 billion dollars to cover their medical bills last year. That is a truly astounding number, and it shows just how dramatically our current health care system has failed. And even though the vast majority of Americans are covered by “health insurance”, millions of us are deathly afraid to go to the hospital because of what it might cost. Today, two-thirds of all personal bankruptcies in the United States are caused by medical bills, and most of the people going bankrupt actually had health insurance. Overall, more than half a million American families are financially ruined by medical bills each year, and meanwhile our “representatives” in Washington are doing absolutely nothing to fix the problem. 
On this day in 1792, the Coinage Act creates the U.S. Mint and provides for the construction of a new building in Philadelphia. That building was the first federal building to be built under the new U.S. Constitution. 
The Federal Reserve is an often misunderstood entity, not only in the mainstream, but also in alternative economic circles. There is this ever pervasive fantasy on both sides of the divide that the central bank actually “cares” about forever protecting the US economy, or at least propping up the US economy in an endless game of “kick the can.” While this might be true at times, it is not true ALL the time. Things change, agendas change, and sometimes the Fed’s goal is not to maintain the economy, but to destroy it. 
