Garret Morgan is training as an ironworker near Seattle and already has a job that pays him $50,000 a year. – Sy Bean/The Hechinger Report
Like most other American high school students, Garret Morgan had it drummed into him constantly: Go to college. Get a bachelor’s degree.
“All through my life it was, ‘if you don’t go to college you’re going to end up on the streets,’ ” Morgan said. “Everybody’s so gung-ho about going to college.”
So he tried it for a while. Then he quit and started training as an ironworker, which is what he is doing on a weekday morning in a nondescript high-ceilinged building with a concrete floor in an industrial park near the Seattle-Tacoma International Airport.
Morgan and several other men and women are dressed in work boots, hard hats and Carhartt’s, clipped to safety harnesses with heavy wrenches hanging from their belts. They’re being timed as they wrestle 600-pound I-beams into place. Continue reading
In the beginning of 2017, you could buy 1 Bitcoin for around $700-$900. Throughout the summer, Bitcoins price started to soar and seemed to reach new highs on almost a daily basis. In the fall of 2017, Bitcoin continued its impressive run, doubling in price in a 30 day period while breaking through the much anticipated $10,000 USD mark. On December 7th, Bitcoin went parabolic and breached $19,000 USD before settling in the $15,000 – $17,000 range. Even long-term Bitcoin enthusiasts were shocked at this price movement. With these spectacular new highs, more people are discovering Bitcoin and it’s becoming increasingly difficult for media pundits to write Bitcoin off as some cypherpunk fad or anomaly. Make no mistake, for better or for worse, Bitcoin has arrived in a big way and it has officially put the financial world on notice. 
In the late 1990s, Ed McKinley fell in love with a $65,000 house by a lake in New Hampshire.
You’d be mistaken to think Harvey, Illinois has a unique pension crisis. It may be the first, and its problems may be the most severe, but the reality is the mess is everywhere, from East St. Louis to Rockford and from Quincy to Danville. A review of Illinois Department of Insurance pension data shows that Harvey could be just the start of a flood of garnishments across the state. 
I commissioned the above cartoon back in 2011 in response to an assertion by CNBC’s Steve Liesman no one would accept a gold coin in a grocery store. My take was that, hell, if I offered a gold coin, I’m pretty sure I would find a taker if I wanted to exchange it for some groceries.
Financial writer and gold expert Bill Holter says China has a lot of weapons to fight a trade war with the U.S. China could stop buying Treasury bonds (as it reportedly already has done). It could sell Treasury bonds. It could slash the value of the Yuan, or something much simpler could happen such as a failed delivery of physical precious metals. Holter says, “If what has happened so far in the first three months of the year were to continue for the full year, you would be over three billion ounces (of silver). That is not deliverable. 
Uncertainty over trade policy may be the primary driver of the U.S. stock market at the moment, but the real policy risk facing equities could be coming from the Federal Reserve, with the potential downside a lot more pronounced than investors are currently anticipating. 
This isn’t exactly the kind of story the IRS wants buzzing around at tax time. The IRS and Justice Department normally want ‘scared straight’ stories just before Tax Day. Ideally, when an indictment or conviction for tax evasion hits the news, it makes you think twice. Somehow, you think just a bit more about all those deductions, or if you really reported all your income, before you sign your return under penalties of perjury. 
