In 1956, the Communist dictator of China, Mao Zedong, launched what was called the Hundred Flowers Campaign. This was a response to dissent from intellectuals and artists in China who felt marginalized by the rigors of Communist rule and doctrinaire ideology beginning with the takeover of China by the Communists in 1949. Mao gave the
Months ago I advanced the thesis that the third great bull market in gold of my lifetime began in December 2015. That was when gold fell to $1,050 per ounce, down 50% from the August 2011 high of $1,900 per ounce (using the $250/oz. price of 1999 as a baseline). The first bull market was
The U.S. Should Be Reaching out to Russia — Not Risking War
It’s impossible to read the headlines or view a financial news channel without hearing about the debt crisis. We hear that the U.S. is facing a debt crisis because budget deficits are out of control. We hear that China is facing a debt crisis because of wasted infrastructure investment, bank ponzi schemes and bad loans
It’s difficult to get economists to agree on anything, but this article is a rare instance of five prominent economists in total agreement. Unfortunately the issue they agree on is that the U.S. is going broke. This article is an op-ed published in the Washington Post and written by Michael Boskin, John Cochrane, John Cogan,
Most investors are familiar with the fact that President Franklin Roosevelt closed all of the banks in America and confiscated all of the privately-owned gold by executive order in the early days of his administration, which began in 1933. Presidents since then have seized assets from countries such as Iran, Syria, North Korea and Cuba
All financial crises are the same and different at the same time. They are the same when it comes to the dynamics of contagion, illiquidity, bank failures and the high-panic state in which everyone in the world wants his money back at the same time. Yet, each crisis is different in its specific causes. The
Admittedly cryptocurrency geeks live in a world of their own and are not fully acquainted with how the domain of central banks and governments actually works. And they’re proud of it! Cryptocurrency supporters in many cases are anarcho-libertarians who thrive on the fact that cryptocurrencies are decentralized, so-called “trustless” systems that do not rely upon
