by John Browne
Over the past few decades, the United States has steadily evolved from a nation of ‘producers’ to one of ‘consumers’. The change has been celebrated by politicians and economists as proof of America’s arrival at the top of the global economic food chain. In reality, the development has depleted the nation of its [...]

By Jacob Greber
July 31 (Bloomberg) — Australia may be headed for a housing recession similar to those roiling the U.S. and U.K.
The cause is a combination of rising default rates, the biggest drop in home prices in five years, the highest borrowing costs in a decade and slowing economic growth.

By Colm Heatley
July 31 (Bloomberg) — Jim Kingham says the credit crunch is hurting his Belfast-area moving company more than the violence that ravaged Northern Ireland for 35 years.
Kingham has fired nine of his 12 workers at A1 Shortnotice, based in Newtownards, as house prices plunge and sales dry up.

by Alan Stang
July 31, 2008
I routinely receive a flood of messages about Khazars. Every other message includes the term “Zionists” or “Zionism.” I exaggerate, but only a little. The messages say innumerable people, things and movements are “Zionist.” One starts to wonder what the word really means. If it means everything, it means nothing. There [...]

by Butler Shaffer
Two excerpts from Alan Greenspan’s book, The Age of Turbulence, provide a succinct expression of how political systems generate the bulk of social disorder and human suffering. While I have not read his book, these two passages go to the essence of the destructive nature of the political mindset: (1) “there can be [...]

The Mises Review: Who Killed the Constitution? The Fate of American Liberty from World War I to George W. Bush by Thomas E. Woods, Jr. and Kevin R.C. Gutzman
The question posed by the title of this book raises a further question, as the authors are well aware. If the Constitution is indeed dead, why [...]

Tom Bawden
July 30, 2008
The banking industry will be forced to take hundreds of billions of dollars of further writedowns on mortgage-backed securities after Merrill Lynch sold $30.6 billion (£15.5 billion) of collateralised debt obligations (CDOs) for only 22 per cent of their face value on Monday, according to a leading US ratings expert.

Mike “Mish” Shedlock
The New York Times is reporting Paterson Warns of Economic Crisis…
In a rare, brief televised address, Gov. David A. Paterson announced on Tuesday afternoon that he would call the Legislature into an emergency session on Aug. 19 to address what he called an economic and budget crisis confronting New York State as a [...]

by Ron Paul
The dangers inherent in the foreign policy advocated by the neo-conservatives are well known. While many Americans have become increasingly aware of those dangers, far less attention has been focused on the dangers of neo-conservative economic policies. This issue is of critical importance right now, because many are mistakenly pointing their fingers at [...]

by Tom Burghardt
July 29, 2008
Operating with little ethical oversight, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) has been tapping cutting-edge advances in neuroscience, computers and robotics in a quest to build the “perfect warfighter.”

By Chuck Baldwin
July 30, 2008
Yesterday, the Politico quoted House Speaker Nancy Pelosi as saying, “I’m trying to save the planet; I’m trying to save the planet.” She was responding, of course, to pressure that she and her fellow Democrats are experiencing to suspend a congressional ban on offshore oil drilling in the face of skyrocketing [...]

Crossing party lines, they urge the federal government to preserve coastal waters and pursue alternative energy projects.
By Kenneth R. Weiss and Michael Rothfeld
July 30, 2008
SACRAMENTO — West Coast governors urged the federal government Tuesday to keep new oil drilling rigs out of their waters and to spend more money on programs to restore the [...]

(Gee…I wonder WHO is going to buy these roads…Hmmm?,,,Paul)
By CHRISTOPHER CONKEY
July 30, 2008
WASHINGTON — The Bush administration unveiled a plan to impose new tolls on freeways and encourage more private investment to finance road and mass-transit projects, a move aimed at stirring debate as lawmakers prepare for a major overhaul of transportation policy.

By Barbara Ehrenreich
July 29, 2008
In a culture where credit rating is the key measure of self-worth, the increasing response to huge debts is “Just shoot me!”
A few days before Congress passed its Housing Bill, Carlene Balderrama of Taunton MA found her own solution to the housing crisis. Just a little over two hours [...]

Eye scans, fingerprints to control NZ borders
By KATIE SMALL - Sunday Star Times | Sunday, 27 July 2008
Border control staff will be able to use iris scans and finger printing to check passengers’ identities under major changes to New Zealand immigration rules.

By Andrew Tilghman
July 28, 2008
Private military contractor Blackwater and its affiliates may have wrongly received more than $100 million in contracts that were supposed to be set aside for small businesses, according to an inspector general’s report released today.

By Mogambo Guru
July 29th, 2008
There are signs of stupidity and panicky desperation everywhere, such as the Dow Jones Industrial Average index going up last week when earnings fell to $132.14 from $146.15! Earnings went down, but the shares went up because there were more buyers than sellers! Hahaha!

Gary Duncan
July 29, 2008
The New York stock market slid more than 2 per cent last night as Wall Street took fright from a warning by the International Monetary Fund that there is no end in sight for the US housing slump.
Financial stocks bore the brunt of the fall, with Lehman Bros, the Wall Street [...]

by Michael S. Rozeff
What do our officials most fear? They fear the public’s loss of confidence. Events are driving their improvised attempts to stem a general loss of confidence in the dollar, in them, the financial and monetary system, and the government as a whole.

By David Brunnstrom
Tue Jul 29, 2008
BRUSSELS (Reuters) - The United States will launch a pilot scheme on Friday which will require travelers covered by its visa waiver programme to get prior Internet authorization before boarding flights to America.

by Charley Reese
Hopefully, the next president, whoever he is, will have sense enough to realize that an anti-missile site in Eastern Europe is not worth rekindling the Cold War with Russia.
Though the press pays little attention to it, the Bush administration has already practically wrecked relations with Russia by insisting on adding the Eastern [...]

by Patrick J. Buchanan
July 29, 2008
“We have to be as careful getting out as we were careless getting in,” says Barack Obama of the U.S. war in Iraq. Wise counsel.
But is Barack taking his own advice? For he pledges to shift two U.S. combat brigades, 10,000 troops, out of Iraq and into Afghanistan, raising [...]

by Ron Paul
Statement before the US House of Representatives on HR 3221 July 24, 2008
Madam Speaker,
For several years, followers of the Austrian school of economics have warned that unless Congress moved to end the implicit government guarantee of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, and took other steps to disengage the US Government from the housing [...]

by Llewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr.
Frédéric Bastiat famously observed that the State costs us in ways we can see and ways we cannot see. Economists tend to focus on the second type because they elude public perceptions. What inventions are we denied because of regulations? What might have been done with the resources that are diverted [...]

Bob Chapman
Vast unexploited oil reserves? An economic threat from too much oil? Dark pools of liquidity, threats of hyperinflation from unsound economy and Fed practices, remembering the lessons from The Great Depression, reactionary measures to protect the dollar, An examination of a crisis scenario.

By: Devvy
July 28, 2008
Relax, Comrade Chertoff. The Case for Hanging Errant Public Officials is the title of a book by James Farrell who also wrote, The Judas Syndrome. The Case for Hanging Errant Public Officials was published in 1988, decades before a Nazi law called the ‘The Patriot Act’ was rammed down our throats. Today, [...]

By GARY LEUPP
July 25, 2008
Commentators whom I respect are saying, with conviction, that there’s no way the U.S. is going to attack Iran. Alexander Cockburn, Jim Lobe and Tom Engelhardt, for example, say no. Others whom I equally respect predict the opposite. Gordon Prather, Ray McGovern, Scott Ritter and Justin Raimondo say yes, it’s going [...]

Suzy Jagger
July 26, 2008
The American housing slump is showing no signs of abating with the number of homeowners facing foreclosure more than doubling in the second quarter of the year.
RealtyTrac, the provider of foreclosure information, said yesterday that the number of homes that had received a foreclosure-related noticed had more than doubled to 739,714 [...]

by Jim Quinn
Make no mistake. Our country is in the midst of a financial crisis of epic proportions. We are in a long national emergency. In the last 6 months, we have been on the brink of financial collapse twice. First, Bear Stearns was going to declare bankruptcy unless it was taken over by the [...]

by Gary North
The bailout of IndyMac’s depositors will probably deplete 10% of the FDIC’s reserves.
Congress will back up the FDIC if the FDIC ever (1) runs out of T-bills to sell (2) to raise money (3) to pay off depositors of insolvent banks. But where will Congress get this money? From the Federal Reserve [...]

By: Mike Shedlock
1. Paulson appears on Face The Nation and says “Our banking system is a safe and a sound one.” If the banking system was safe and sound, everyone would know it (or at least think it). There would be no need to say it.
2. Paulson says the list of troubled banks “is [...]

David Edwards and Andrew McLemore
Friday July 25, 2008
A reverend claims security guards dragged him out of a Toledo, Ohio hospital and tasered and beat him because he told a joke, CBS reported Friday.
Rev. Al Poisson said he was visiting the hospital to see a man who had been injured while Poisson was shopping with his [...]

By BRENDAN RILEY
Jul 26
CARSON CITY, Nev. (AP) - The 28 branches of 1st National Bank of Nevada and First Heritage Bank, operating in Nevada, Arizona and California, were closed Friday by federal regulators.
The banks, owned by Scottsdale, Ariz.-based First National Bank Holding Co., were scheduled to reopen on Monday as Mutual of Omaha Bank branches, [...]

by Bud Conrad
July 25, 2008
As investors, the question we have to focus most of our attention on just now is what impact the credit crisis, the bursting housing bubble and the actions of the U.S. government will have on the economy and investment markets in the next six months.

By: Alan Stang
Saturday, July 26, 2008
By now it is obvious that Ponzi Paulson and Bozo Ben Bernanke are deliberately collapsing the dollar. The proof is that no one could be so stupid by accident. They are collapsing the dollar to panic the people into acceptance of the “Amero,” the currency of the North American Union, [...]

By: Kurt_Kasun
Jul 24, 2008
The financial system will collapse before “zero-hour” actually occurs. I think we are seeing signs of it in the desperate measures being employed to nationalize companies which trade on market exchanges as private enterprises. There is simply no way to defend the SEC’s decision to selectively enforce the prohibition of naked short [...]

by Joshua Snyder
Milblogger “GI Korea” of ROK Drop does a yeoman’s job in exposing just one aspect of the folly of Empire – Korea Continues to Delay Cost Sharing Deal. He makes the startling observation that “South Korea pays far less per year in USFK upkeep fees then what they send to North Korea every [...]

By: Sean Scallon
Thursday, July 24, 2008
You know when someone is a part of the establishment or at least as seen as a benign threat to it when you get puff pieces written about you as Rush Limbaugh did by Zev Chafets in the New York Times Magazine.

by William Norman Grigg
Here’s a critically important principle: In any “public/private partnership,” the state is always the senior partner. When Christian leaders are on Caesar’s payroll, they have to render to him things to which he is not entitled. And when Caesar’s tactical priorities change, those religious leaders who thought they could co-opt the power [...]

by Alan Stang
July 24, 2008
By now it is obvious that Ponzi Paulson and Bozo Ben Bernanke are deliberately collapsing the dollar. The proof is that no one could be so stupid by accident. They are collapsing the dollar to panic the people into acceptance of the “Amero,” the currency of the North American Union, which [...]

By Chuck Baldwin
July 23, 2008
I want to begin this column with one of my all-time favorite quotes. It comes from the great German reformer Martin Luther. He said, “If I profess with the loudest voice and clearest exposition every portion of the truth of God except precisely that little point which the world and the [...]

Robin Bromby
June 23, 2008
Robin Bromby | June 23, 2008
PERHAPS it is time to hoist the storm warning flags and, at the same time, take as calm a look as possible at what this might mean for resources portfolios.
What we’ve read in the past week suggests that, while companies producing oil and metals can [...]

By Shelley Smith and John Glover
July 22 (Bloomberg) — Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson’s plan to revive U.S. mortgage financing depends on investors buying the same kind of bonds they’re shunning in Europe.
Paulson wants to create a version of Europe’s market for covered bonds in the U.S. just as sales of the debt have [...]

By Reuters
21 Jul 2008
American Express posted earnings well below forecasts, sending its stock down sharply in after-hours trading.
The fourth-largest U.S. credit card issuer saw its profit fall 38 percent as it set aside more money to cover credit losses.

by Robert Higgs
Many people deny that the U.S. government presides over a global empire. If you speak of U.S. imperialism, they will fancy that you must be a decrepit Marxist-Leninist who has recently awakened after spending decades in a coma. Yet the facts cannot be denied, however much people’s ideology may predispose them to distort [...]

By Larry Pratt
July 22, 2008
On July 2 I went to jail.
Happily for me, I left right away. Sadly for David Olofson and his family, he had to stay, and will have to stay for 30 months in the Federal Correctional Institute in Sandstone, Minnesota.

By Paul Proctor
July 22, 2008
I’ll never forget the day I downloaded the very popular Google Earth software onto my home computer and found stunningly clear and close-up aerial photographs of significant places from my past – and a few from the present. It was absolutely breathtaking to go from a satellite view of the entire [...]

Marc Courtenay
July 20, 2008
You’ll be happy you own gold and silver once you read this, compliments of our associates at Stansberry Research and the S&A Digest: “Sovereign wealth funds,” foreign government investment pools, are dumping the dollar. One big fund in the Persian Gulf has cut its dollar-denominated holdings from more than 80% a [...]

Canada Will Become Test Case
by Kevin Parkinson
July 20, 2008
In the last 15 years or so, as a society we have had access to more information than ever before in modern history because of the Internet. There are approximately 1 billion Internet users in the world B and any one of these users can theoretically [...]

By Peter S. Goodman
July 20, 2008
NEW YORK: In the narrative that has governed American commercial life for the last quarter-century, saving companies from their own mistakes was not supposed to be part of the government’s job description. Economic policymakers in the United States took swaggering pride in the cutthroat but lucrative form of capitalism [...]

By The Mogambo Guru
That the national embarrassments known as Fannie Mae and Freddy Mac are in the news a lot these days means that I should say something about it to show that I have been paying attention. So I will turn one jaundiced eye to the whole unsavory episode and say that these [...]

By Ambrose Evans- Pritchard
21/07/2008
It feels like the summer of 1931. The world’s two biggest financial institutions have had a heart attack. The global currency system is breaking down. The policy doctrines that got us into this mess are bankrupt. No world leader seems able to discern the problem, let alone forge a solution.

by Michael S. Rozeff
Most unfortunately, American-style fascism, after learning how to walk between 1898 and 1918, took its Great Leap Forward under Franklin Delano Roosevelt, thirty-second President of the U.S.A. (1933–1945). America has not looked back. The toddler has attained maturity. Not entirely fascist yet – nobody’s perfect – we are far gone. Recent financial [...]

By: Devvy
July 21, 2008
My column on the FDA produced more than 2500 emails this past week; the master list of diseases is now updated. The issue of a nation self medicating on dangerous drugs approved by the FDA really struck a chord. In that column, I pointed out two major factors why Americans are so [...]

By: Bob Chapman, The International Forecaster
Sunday, 20 July 2008
The following are some snippets from the most recent issue of the International Forecaster. For the full 21 page issue, please see subscription information below.
US MARKETS

by Phillip D. Collins
Benito Mussolini said, “Fascism should more appropriately be called Corporatism because it is a merger of state and corporate power.”
This model of economic fascism was adopted by Germany and Italy in the 1930s. And, I submit to yo