Anatomy of the End Game

Markets cannot arbitrage fiat money, but can repudiate the sovereign debt that backs it

by Martin Sibileau

About a month ago, in the third-quarter report of a Canadian global macro fund, its strategist made the interesting observation that “…Four ideas in particular have caught the fancy of economic policy makers and have been successfully sold to the public…” One of these ideas “…that has taken root, at least among the political and intellectual classes, is that one need not fear fiscal deficits and debt provided one has monetary sovereignty…”. This idea is currently growing, particularly after Obama’s re-election. But it was only after writing our last letter, on the revival of the Chicago Plan (as proposed in an IMF’ working paper), that we realized that the idea is morphing into another one among Keynesians: That because there cannot be a gold-to-US dollar arbitrage like in 1933, governments do indeed have the monetary sovereignty.

Is this true? I will try to show why it is not, and in the process, it will also describe the endgame for the current crisis. Without further ado…

After the fall of the KreditAnstalt in 1931, with the world living under the gold-exchange standard, depositors first in central Europe, and later in France and England, began to withdraw their deposits and buy gold, challenging the reserves of their respective central banks. The leverage that linked the balance sheet of each central bank had been provided by currency swaps, a novelty at the time, which had openly been denounced by Jacques Rueff. One by one, central banks were forced to leave the gold standard (i.e. devalue) until in 1933, it was the Fed’s turn. The story is well known and the reason this process was called an “arbitrage” is simply that there can never be one asset with two prices. In this case, gold had an “official”, government guaranteed price and a market price, in terms of fiat money (i.e. schillings, pounds, francs, US dollars). The consolidated balance sheets of the central bank, financial institutions and non-financial sector looked like this before the run:

The Brilliant but Confused Radicalism of George Orwell

Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-four, have earned him a place in the libertarian tradition

by Jeff Riggenbach

Eric Arthur Blair, who is best known under his pseudonym, George Orwell, was born 107 years ago this month in India, where his father was a British civil servant. His father’s job, according to Orwell biographer Gordon Bowker, “was to oversee the growing of opium, mainly for export to China.” Though young Eric’s mother had herself grown up in Burma, the daughter of yet another British civil servant, she had long since tired of Asia; and when her son was only a year old she successfully lobbied her husband to ship her and their two children — Eric and his older sister, Marjorie — back to England. Eric did not see his father again for eight years, until he was nine years old and had come home for Christmas vacation from his “prep school,” St. Cyprian’s.

Here in the States, a “prep school” is a high school; it preps — that is, it prepares — its students for college, which, on this side of the Atlantic is something that comes after high school and comprises, in effect, grades 13 through 16. In the England Eric Blair grew up in, however, a “prep school” was for children 8 to 13. What it was preparing these children for was what we would call “high school,” but what Eric grew up thinking of as “college.” College, in turn, prepared you for university.

Eric was sent to St. Cyprian’s when he was 8 years old and remained there until he was 13, whereupon he transferred for another five years to Eton College — a very famous and very expensive private high school, long favored by the British upper classes. After Eton graduated him in 1921, he never went to school again. Why? Orwell answered that question in an autobiographical essay called “Such, Such Were the Joys,” written in the early 1940s but never published until the early ’50s, a few years after his death, and then only in the United States. It was not published in England until nearly 20 years after his death.

In this essay, Orwell judged the education he had received at St. Cyprian’s to be inferior. “The whole process,” he wrote,

The 1930s All Over Again?

Centralization of powers and the thinning of capital can lead to destruction

Then, as today, societies were uncertain about which model of society to strive for and how to repair monetary systems. Societies bet on the wrong ideas; we may be committing similar mistakes now.

By Reuven Brenner
Many people draw parallels between today and the 1930s, labeling this the Great Recession. They note the high unemployment rate, referring not to the mismeasured, official statistic, but to the number more than double that rate, which also accounts for those who dropped out from the labor force and are no longer counted as “unemployed.” Others worry about the deflationary risk, the dollar devaluation, and the status of the U.S. dollar as reserve currency. Still others worry that the “vital few” — those with high scientific aptitudes and entrepreneurial drive — no longer come to or stay in the United States, but stay in or go back to the many countries whose Iron Curtains have been punctured since 1989.

Yet the most worrying parallel with the 1930s is one that is not discussed. Then, as today, societies were uncertain about the model of society they should strive for and about how to repair domestic and international monetary systems after wildly varying expansions of credit during and after World War I in the different countries. In addressing these two questions, societies ended up betting on the wrong ideas, which had long-term, disastrous consequences. We may be committing similar mistakes now.

Recall the 1920s and 1930s: Germany, Hungary, Austria, and Italy all destroyed their middle classes and financial markets with hyperinflation — a destruction that has always been a recipe for both political instability and predictable centralization of power. After all, once financial markets are destroyed, even if inadvertently, governments and central banks become financial intermediaries — by default.

Action, Time, and the Market

The Market integrates all the factors affecting human action into a systematic whole

by Jeffrey M. Herbener

The wellspring of all economic theory is the reality of the human condition. As a finite being, man makes a distinction between ends and means. He cannot attain his ends by an act of will alone, but must apply means to attain his ends. Man lives in an orderly but finite world. Using means produces only limited effects in attaining ends. Endowed with reason, man is able to perceive the causal connection between the use of means and the attainment of ends. 

Any action toward the attainment of an end requires surrendering the attainment of another end with the same means. And any action using a set of means requires foregoing using another set of means to attain the same end. Action, therefore, requires choice. As a purposeful being, man selects what he perceives to be higher-valued ends to pursue and what he perceives to be lower-valued sets of means to employ. 

Choice, therefore, requires a judgment of the mind. Since attaining the end is the purpose of an action, the value a person attaches to the attainment of the end is primary. A person attaches only derivative value to the means used in action since they are merely aids to the attainment of the end. Means have no value independent of the value a person attaches to the end they help attain. The human mind imputes value to the means according to the aid they render in attaining a valuable end. The technical properties of each of the means that combine to attain an end can be valued differently by different persons or by the same person at different times and, therefore, have no causal impact on choice and action independent of the judgment of the mind.

People Vs Fruit Flies

Malthus and the Assault on Population

by Murray N. Rothbard

One of the first Smithian economists, and, indeed, a man who was for two decades the only professor of political economy in England, was the Rev. Thomas Robert Malthus (1766–1834). Malthus was born in Surrey, the son of a respected and wealthy lawyer and country gentleman. Malthus graduated from Jesus College, Cambridge, in 1788 with honors in mathematics and five years later became a fellow of that college. During that same year, Robert Malthus became an Anglican curate in Surrey, in the parish where he had been born.

Malthus seemed destined to lead the quiet life of a bachelor curate, when, in 1804, at nearly 40, he married and promptly had three children. The year after his marriage, Malthus became the first professor of history and political economy in England, at the new East India College at Haileybury, a post he retained until his death. All his life, Malthus remained a Smithian, and was to become a close friend, though not disciple, of David Ricardo. His only marked deviation from Smithian doctrine, as we shall see, was his proto-Keynesian worry about alleged underconsumption during the economic crisis after the end of the Napoleonic Wars.

But Malthus was, of course, far more than a Smithian academic, and he gained both widespread fame and notoriety while still a bachelor. For "Population" Malthus became known worldwide for his famous assault on human population.

In previous centuries, insofar as writers or economists dealt with the problem at all, they were almost uniformly propopulationists. A large and growing population was considered a sign of prosperity, and a spur to progress. The only exception, as we have seen, was the late-16th-century Italian absolutist theorist Giovanni Botero, the first to warn that population growth is an ever-present danger, tending as it does to increase without limit, while the means of subsistence grows only slowly. But Botero lived at the threshold of great economic growth, of advances in total population as well as standards of living, and so his gloomy views got very short shrift by contemporaries or later thinkers. Indeed, absolutists and mercantilists tended to admire growing population as providing more hands for production on behalf of the state apparatus as well as more fodder for its armies.

Even those 18th century writers who believed that population tended to increase without limit, curiously enough favored that development. This was true of the American Benjamin Franklin (1706–90), in his Observations Concerning the Increase of Mankind and the Peopling of Countries(1751). Similarly, the physiocrat leader Mirabeau, in his famous L'Ami des Hommes ou traité de la population (The Friend of Man or a Treatise on Population) (1756), while comparing human reproduction to that of rats — they would multiply up to the very limit of subsistence like "rats in a barn" — yet advocated such virtually unlimited reproduction.

A large population, said Mirabeau, was a boon and a source of wealth, and it was preciselybecause people will multiply like rats in a barn up to the limit of subsistence that agriculture — and hence the production of food — should be encouraged. Mirabeau had picked up the "rats-in-a-barn" metaphor from Cantillon, but unfortunately did not inherit Cantillon's highly sensible and sophisticated "optimum-population" realization that human beings will flexibly adjust population to standards of living, and that their noneconomic values will help them decide on whatever trade-offs they may choose between a slightly larger population or a smaller population and higher standards of living.

Is This The End Of The Chilean Economic Miracle?

It is about time to take the populist path of Hugo Chavez

By Axel Kaiser

This November, Chile will face what could prove to be the most important presidential and parliamentary election since the one which brought democracy back to the country in 1990. For the first time in more than two decades, the Chilean people will choose between two opposing economic and social projects. On the one hand, the center right candidate Evelyn Matthei promises to continue Chile along the successful economic path of the last decades. And on the other hand, former president Michelle Bachelet’s new socialist platform promises to make radical changes to the current Chilean economic system.

The political parties of the the coalition that governed Chile from 1990 to 2010, the Communist party, and other minor left-wing groups merged into Bachelet´s coalition called “Nueva Mayoría.” The Communist party has historically been a destabilizing factor in Chilean politics and has been absent from government since 1973. Fully embedded in the logic of the Cold War, it still considers Fidel Castro´s Cuba the ideal political and economic system. Despite its anti-democratic features and its limited number of supporters, Chilean communists have managed to become increasingly influential in national politics through the massive student movement that brought President Piñera´s government to its knees in 2011 and 2012.

Along with a systematic campaign against the free market economic model by leading progressive intellectuals, the leftist student movement — whose most emblematic leader is a member of the Communist Party — has contributed to an ideological radicalization of the classical left-wing political parties, including the Christian Democrats. As a result of the radicalization, Bachelet´s political platform breaks away from the previous consensus among all major political parties on the need to preserve an economic model based on free market institutions. Questioning this economic consensus hasn’t happened since the return of democracy in 1990. Back then, the Concertación accepted and even deepened the free market economic model created by the military regime of General Augusto Pinochet, which brutally took over power in September 1973 after the disastrous socialist experiment of president Salvador Allende and the Unidad Popular Government.

Why Economic Failure Causes Political Polarization

Getting causality backward

by John Taylor

It is a common view that the shutdown, the debt-limit debacle and the repeated failure to enact entitlement and pro-growth tax reform reflect increased political polarization. I believe this gets the causality backward. Today's governance failures are closely connected to economic policy changes, particularly those growing out of the 2008 financial crisis.

The crisis did not reflect some inherent defect of the market system that needed to be corrected, as many Americans have been led to believe. Rather it grew out of faulty government policies.

In the years leading up to the panic, mainly 2003-05, the Federal Reserve held interest rates excessively low compared with the monetary policy strategy of the 1980s and '90s—a monetary strategy that had kept recessions mild. The Fed's interest-rate policies exacerbated the housing boom and thus the ensuing bust. More generally, extremely low interest rates led individual and institutional investors to search for yield and to engage in excessive risk taking, as Geert Bekaert of Columbia University and his colleagues showed in a study published by the European Central Bank in July.

Meanwhile, regulators who were supposed to supervise large financial institutions, including Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, allowed large deviations from existing safety and soundness rules. In particular, regulators permitted high leverage ratios and investments in risky, mortgage-backed securities that also fed the housing boom.

After the housing bubble burst the value of mortgage-backed securities plummeted, putting the solvency of the many banks and other financial institutions at risk. The government stepped in, but its ad hoc bailout policy was on balance destabilizing.

Moral Realism vs. Evolutionary Biology?

Moral reasons do not require reduction to something else in order to count as legitimate

by David Gordon

To review Thomas Nagel's new book for the Mises Daily seems at first sight a misplaced endeavor. The book has nothing to say about libertarianism or Austrian economics; moreover, Nagel's own political views are decidedly non-libertarian. He wrote the most influential critical review of Nozick's Anarchy, State, and Utopia, and he rejects Lockean theories of property ownership, instead viewing property rights as conventional.[1]Nevertheless, one chapter in the book raises issues of profound concern to anyone interested in political philosophy, and it is for this reason that I wish to comment on it here.

Suppose one says that it is wrong to initiate force against other people. What does it mean to say that this claim is true? Are moral judgments just personal preferences, or are they more than this? Mises favored the former alternative. We can judge objectively that certain actions are suitable means to achieve a goal, but ultimate value judgments cannot be assessed as rational or irrational.

To apply the concept rational or irrational to the ultimate end chosen is nonsensical. We may call irrational the ultimate given, viz., those things that our thinking can neither analyze nor reduce to other ultimately given things. Then every ultimate end chosen by any man is irrational. It is neither more nor less rational to aim at riches like Croesus than to aim at poverty like a Buddhist monk. (Human Action, p. 880)

What Real Estate Bubble?

Oh, You Mean the One That's Bigger Than the 2007 Bubble?

By Charles Hugh Smith

The Wilshire REIT (real estate investment trusts) index sums up the current real estate market in one image: 

it’s painfully obvious that real estate valuations are once again at asset-bubble extremes, one that’s even bigger than the last RE bubble that popped in 2008 with devastating consequences to the global economy.

Defenders of current real estate valuations can draw upon an array of justifications, but they boil down to the same one used to justify valuations in every asset bubble: this time it’s different.

Is there anything in this chart that suggests this belief might be misplaced, for example, that credit/asset bubbles burst with a rough time/amplitude symmetry?

Internet lessons to learn

This is a new ball game for everybody, in both democratic and authoritarian governments

By Francesco Sisci 
BEIJING - The whole issue of cyber security exploded in recent days in Europe, as news of America wiretapping its European allies has huge and multi-faceted implications for global safety and development. There are roughly three interrelated aspects to it, and China, although not part of the present scandal, is part of it. (See also Common folk aren't US's cyber-targets, Asia Times Online, June 18, 2013.) 

Cyber-spying has become the main instrument to steal not only political confidences but also technological and scientific secrets. For a developing country like China with growing cyber capabilities, cyber infiltrations abroad can be a very important instrument to improve its own industry, which is currently strained by sanctions forbidding the export of sensitive technologies. 

These technologies may also have dual uses for civilian and military purposes. However, the theft of these tools, although it may help Chinese science leapfrog in its progress, hooks Chinese technologies to the model of the advanced countries. De facto, it may blunt China's indigenous and original scientific advance, as it is easier to try to steal secrets from abroad than to foster homegrown research. 

In a way, the same pattern took place with computers when pirating software and hardware technologies from America hooked Chinese improvement to that of America. In the same way, by having its technologies stolen in China, America, the leading country in many fields, can impose its own model on China or even "leak" (let Beijing cyber-steal wrong parts) faulty technologies to China, which may lead Chinese astray. 

However, there is a bigger issue in cyber security. All countries have a greater ability to attack than to defend their own turfs. That is, if China is able to breach American or European cyber secrets, it is most likely also very weak in defending its own secrets. This may not be too important, because China does not have many scientific secrets to be stolen compared to America or Europe. Overall, the Chinese political and social system is weaker than America's. This reveals a deep weakness of a system that is more rigid and therefore able to be shaken by attacks by foreign cyber forces. Conversely, America may have more secrets to be stolen, but its social and political system is much more resilient to attack.

The fall and fall of Asian fertility

The unwillingness of young Asians to start families echoes a worldwide rejection of the capacity to live independently

by STUART DERBYSHIRE

Fertility rates in East Asia have fallen catastrophically since the early 1970s and are now the lowest in the world. In all parts of Asia, the total fertility rate (TFR) has fallen by half or more in the past 35 years. In Japan, South Korea, Hong Kong, Taiwan and Singapore, the TFR hovers between 1.0-1.3. For a population to replace itself, the TFR needs to be above 2.1. Thus, if these trends in fertility are not substantially reversed, the population of Asia will rapidly shrink as the continent heads into extinction. How did this happen?

Most commentators are inclined to blame the falling rate of TFR on the influence of modernity on women. Speaking in 1983, for example, Singapore’s then prime minister, Lee Kuan Yew, infamously remarked that educating women and bringing them into the workforce had undermined their more traditional role as mothers: ‘It is too late for us to reverse our policies… Our women will not stand for it. And anyway, they have already become too important a factor in the economy.’

Despite the growing prosperity of Asia and the introduction of women into the workforce, family life in Asia remains male-centred, with females playing a subordinate role. Working mothers are still expected to maintain all domestic activity and will perform ‘second shift’ domestic duties regardless of their profession or educational achievement. Korean women, for example, put in an average of four hours of domestic work per day compared with 17 minutes from men (1). That imbalance gets worse after children and, perhaps unsurprisingly, about two thirds of women in Korea and Japan exit the labour force immediately prior to the birth of their first child. Given these punishing expectations, it is understandable that many Asian women make the pragmatic choice to avoid becoming pregnant.

Understanding Europe's Delusion, Dilemma, And Endgame In Under 9 Minutes

Very slowly and then at once

by tyler drusden

If one watches (or reads) any of the mainstream media, it might seem 'obvious' that Europe is doing well; it's recovering; and the crisis is over (almost over..). However, as Punk Economic's David McWilliams explains in this excellent overview of the European delusion and Merkel's dilemma,there is a "wedge" of unreality between the so-called "markets" and the reality of economic progress. From playing with Germany's money to moar bailouts, and from Merkel's enabling of Draghi's excess to the reality that nothing has changed across the European region, in under 9 minutes, McWilliams brief tour-de-force is a must-watch before you 'chase' more performance with the herd. McWilliams concludes, however, with a darker edge of the inevitable endgame of a "slow trudge" to federalization (and loss of sovereignty) that will likely see Nigel Farage (and many others) apoplectic.

So much for the U.S. economy and the free market

Ben Bernanke's Hubris Has Him Attempting To Challenge The Laws Of Gravity

By Moshe Silver

Why is America’s top central banker standing in the way of economic growth and a strong U.S. dollar? If you’re wondering what the answer is to this, and why the monetary madness shows no sign of stopping, you’re not alone. Many Fed observers remain aghast at the power our unelected Fed Chairman has arrogated to himself since being appointed.

Case in point: Last month’s head-scratching “Taper-Not-Heard-‘Round-The-World” when Ben Bernanke challenged economic gravity by refusing to curtail the mind numbing scope of unprecedented Fed asset purchases. Unlike his predecessor (Alan “I made a mistake” Greenspan), Professor Bernanke has yet to admit error. Like New York’s fabled Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia, when he does… it’ll be a doozy! To be clear, the markets were signaling their willingness to charge ahead under their own steam – until Bernanke’s shrug reignited bond prices and depressed an already depressed dollar.

The Trouble with the New “Islamic Science”

Modern science is not a body of facts, but a process for the study of the natural world

By Imad-ad-Dean Ahmad

The history of Islam’s relation to science has largely been one of harmony. It offers no real parallel to the occasional bouts of suspicion toward science that the Christian world experienced. Today, many Muslims can be found in the fields of medicine and engineering. Even the ultraconservative Muslims who long for a return to the ethical norms of the seventh century see no need to abandon cell phones to do so, and even the most extreme of Islamic extremists envies the high-tech oil-extraction techniques and the weaponry of the West. Muslims, both conservative and liberal, issue fatwas (legal opinions) over the Internet without any hesitation over the technology they employ and with no fear that it may be haram (prohibited).

However, although contemporary Muslims tend not to be averse to science or technology, their strong belief in the compatibility of science and Islam may leave them vulnerable to dubious efforts to equate the two. The effort to harmonize modern technical knowledge and practice with Islamic teaching is part of a project known as the “Islamization of knowledge,” and is quite popular among Muslim intellectuals today. The most visible area of this intellectual work has been in the world of finance, with the development of so-called “Islamic banking.” A wide variety of venture-capital investments, joint-development projects, and partnership financing have been devised to avoid the appearance of charging interest, a practice forbidden by traditional Muslim jurisprudence. On a smaller scale, there has been a rising interest in bringing the sciences into a conversation with Islamic teachings.

An Emerging Pattern

Lame Excuses to Expand State Control Over the Internet

by Pater Tenebrarum

Slowly but surely, a pattern is emerging. We always wondered why the Snowden revelations were 'allowed' to get out, and why the mainstream media, which previously had not breathed a word about what people like William Binneyhad to say (whose whistle-blowing preceded Edward Snowden's by a good while), suddenly started to make so much noise. The pattern that is lately emerging is that governments are using these revelations to try to extend their control over the internet – see for example the plans recently announced by Brazil.

While previous attempts to corral the internet via copyright legislation failed, the outcry over NSA spying has opened new avenues to extend state control, and these plans naturally enjoy broad support – after all, nobody wants to be spied on by US spooks. The reason why one must be highly suspicious of all these proposals that purport to 'protect' the population from spying is that we know for a fact that Western governments are in reality not worried in the least about NSA spying. This is because all of them are doing it.  Mr. Hollande's faux moral outrage (which forms the basis of his insane proposal to tax EU data transfers) should deceive precisely no-one. As we pointed out in early July:

[...] the French government is spying on its citizens wholesale as well – in what has been described as a 'huge operation'.”

In the same article we also wrote about the close cooperation of German and US secret services, and as der Spiegel just reported, even Mrs. Merkel's outrage over the NSA listening in to one of her cell phones is largely play-acting:

“One particular point of clarification was especially important to Angela Merkel during the EU summit in Brussels last week. When she complained about the NSA's alleged tapping of her cellphone, the German chancellor made clear that her concern was not for herself, but for the "telephones of millions of EU citizens," whose privacy she said was compromised by US spying.

Yet at a working dinner with fellow EU heads of state on Thursday, where the agenda included a proposed law to bolster data protection, Merkel's fighting spirit on behalf of the EU's citizens seemed to have dissipated.

In fact, internal documents show that Germany applied the brakes when it came to speedy passage of such a reform. Although a number of EU member states — including France, Italy and Poland — were pushing for the creation of a Europe-wide modern data protection framework before European Parliament elections take place in May 2014, the issue ended up tabled until 2015. Great Britain, itself suspected of spying on its EU partners, and Prime Minister David Cameron, who has former Google CEO Eric Schmidt as one of his advisors, put up considerable resistance. He pushed instead for the final summit statement to call simply for "rapid" progress on a solid EU data-protection framework.

Cuba and the Two Currencies

The Cuban currency is a faithful expression of Cuba's economy

By Carlos Alberto Montaner

The government of Raúl Castro has declared its intention to put a gradual end to monetary duality. Splendid. The faster that cruel anomaly disappears, the better. The fraud, begun in 1994, has lasted all too long.

Two currencies circulate on the island. One is the peso, or CUP, lacking in purchasing power, which is used to pay workers. The other is the CUC, or convertible peso, more or less equivalent to the dollar, which is used to purchase - at international prices - anything its bearer wishes to buy.

Although officially the regular peso and the convertible peso have the same value, in reality the CUC is traded for 24 CUPs. That's one reason why the average salary of Cubans is one of the lowest in the world, ranging from $10 to $20 a month.

The end of monetary duality will not end the island's economic woes. All it will achieve is to make the disaster more transparent. The more transparent the economy becomes, the more obvious its failings will be.

 Bottom of Form

Let us understand: This detestable trick is not the problem. It's only the reflection of a grave reality, the system's huge lack of productivity.

The Cuban currency is a faithful expression of Cuba's economy. It's a mess, because the collectivism planned by the commissars, based on the superstitions of Marxism-Leninism, causes the production and productivity of Cubans to be abysmally low. ("It's the system, stupid," James Carville might say.)

System Reset 2014-2015

Resets occur when the price of everything that has been repressed, manipulated or obscured is repriced

by Charles Hugh-Smith

The global financial system will reset in 2014-2015, regardless of official pronouncements and financial media propaganda hyping the "recovery." Despite the wide spectrum of forecasts (from rosy to stormy), nobody knows precisely what will transpire in 2014-2015, so we must remain circumspect about any and all predictions-- especially our own.

Even as we are mindful of the risks of a forecast being wrong (and the righteous humility that befits any analysis), it seems increasingly self-evident that financial systems around the world are reaching extremes that generally presage violent resets to new equilibria--typically at much lower levels of complexity and energy consumption.

John Michael Greer has described the process of descending stair-step resets (my description, not his) as catabolic collapse. The system resets at a lower level and maintains the new equilibrium for some time before the next crisis/system failure triggers another reset.

There is much systems-analysis intelligence in Greer's concept: systems without interactive feedbacks may collapse suddenly in a heap, but more complex systems tend to stair-step down in a series of resets to lower levels of consumption and complexity--for example, the Roman Empire, which reset many times before reaching the near-collapse level of phantom legions, full-strength on official documents, defending phantom borders.

Swedish reforms have been many, systematic, and comprehensive

A Swedish Lesson 

By Anders Åslund

To Brits, Sweden with its tightly regulated social welfare state is often a byword for socialism. But in the last two decades the country has been transformed. today it offers a flexible and dynamic European model with ever falling public expenditure, lower taxes, economic growth and budget surpluses.

After many years of absence from the Swedish debate, I attended a conference on the Swedish economy in the southern city of Malmö in May, organized by Swedbank. The 180 speakers represented the full range of Swedish views, which have moved amazingly far to the free-market right, not least social democrats and trade union leaders. Key values are competition, openness and efficiency, while social and environmental values remain. The idea is not to abolish social welfare but to make it more efficient through competition among private providers. A new consensus has emerged on having a social welfare society rather than a social welfare state.

The changes have been dramatic. While Sweden’s public expenditure has fallen by one-fifth of gross domestic product since 1993, between 2000 and 2009 Britain’s public expenditure skyrocketed by 15 per cent. This has brought Swedish and British public spending to a similar level, but Sweden’s is still steadily falling. Swedish taxes have been cut and her markets have opened up. The Social Democratic Party was in power from 1932 until 1976, and again from 1994 until 2006, but Sweden was actually quite a liberal market economy until 1968. After a century of superior growth, its GDP per capita was the third highest in the world.

Saudi Arabia: The real terror tyrant

Invent enemies and then slay them in order to control your subjects

By Nauman Sadiq 

Social selection plays the same role in the social sciences which the natural selection plays in the biological sciences: it selects the traits, norms and values which are most beneficial to the host culture. Seen from this angle, social diversity is a desirable quality for social progress since when diverse customs and value-systems compete with each other, they take the best and reject the worst from each. 

A decentralized and unorganized religion, like Sufism, engenders diverse strains of beliefs and thoughts which compete with one another in gaining social acceptance. A heavily centralized and tightly organized religion, on the other hand, depends more on authority and dogma, than value and utility. A centralized religion is also more ossified and less adaptive. 

When we look at religious extremism and the consequent militancy and terrorism, in Pakistan in particular and the Islamic world in general, in the natural evolution of religion, some deleterious mutation must have occurred somewhere, which has infected the whole of Islamic world. 

Marx and Alienation

The only happy ending is that of the collective organism, the species, with each individual member of that organism being brusquely annihilated along the way

by Murray N. Rothbard

"Alienation," to Marx, bears no relation to the fashionable prattle of late-20th-century Marxoid intellectuals. It did not mean a psychological feeling, of anxiety or estrangement, which could somehow be blamed on capitalism, or on cultural or sexual "repression." Alienation, for Marx, was far more fundamental, more cosmic. It meant, at the very least, as we have seen, the institutions of money, specialization, and the division of labor.[1] The eradication of these evils was necessary to unite the collective organism or species man "to himself," to heal these splits within "himself" and between man and "himself" in the form of man-created nature. But the radical evil of alienation was yet far more cosmic than that. It was metaphysical, a deep part of the philosophy and the world-view that Marx picked up from Hegel, and which, through its allied "dialectic," brought to Marx the outlines of the engine that would inevitably bring us communism as a law of history, with the ineluctability of a law of nature.

It all started with the 3rd-century philosopher Plotinus, a Platonist philosopher and his followers, and with a theological discipline seemingly remote from political and economic affairs: creatology, the "science" of the First Days. We have already seen, in fact, that another allied and almost equally remote branch of theology — eschatology, or the science of the Last Days — can have enormous political and economic consequences and ramifications.

The critical question of creatology is, Why did God create the universe? The answer of orthodox Augustinian Christianity, and hence the answer of Catholics, Lutherans, and Calvinists alike, is that God, a perfect being, created the universe out of benevolence and love for his creatures. Period. 

Alan Greenspan’s Shock Revelation

Asking for Trouble

by Bill Bonner

 “We really can't forecast all that well. We pretend that we can but we can't. And markets do really weird things sometimes because they react to the way people behave, and sometimes people are a little screwy.”

– Alan Greenspan, speaking this week on “The Daily Show”

“Jobs Report Leaves Fed in Doubt,” was a big headline on Wednesday morning. Later in the day came this: “Dow down 54 on jobs concern.” What is the Fed in doubt about? To taper, or not to taper, that is the question. And why should a jobs report make any difference?

Oh, dear reader, where have you been? Don’t you know everyone now sits on the edge of his seat wondering when and how the Fed will back off from its massive QE program? And don’t you know the future of civilization hangs in the balance? On that point, we have a position… a thought… a reaction. Civilization hangs in the balance, but not in the way you think.

 We have been trying to introduce a new way of looking at civilization. In short, we’ve tried to make it more civilized. What is the difference between a civilized community and a barbaric one? We have introduced a simple test. The civilized community relies mostly on cooperation and consent. The uncivilized community depends heavily on force and violence.

A French historian first introduced the word “civilization” less than 300 years ago. Since then there has been much argument about what it means. We enter the fray gingerly, but sure of ourselves. It only makes sense on our terms. A civilized community is peaceful; a barbaric one is not.

“Okay, Bill,” you may be saying to yourself. “I’ll give you that one… I guess. But what the hell difference does it make? What has it got to do with the jobs report?” Good questions. Glad you asked.

The New, Tyrannical Normal

DC Big Bank Takeover

By Mark Hendrickson

If there is one truth that became apparent during the financial panic five years ago, it is that Big Government and Big Finance are inseparable. Of course Uncle Sam was going to bail out Wall Street, for without the financial infrastructure that Wall Street provides to maintain orderly markets in various securities, particularly debt instruments, the multi-trillion dollar operation of our federal government would cease to function.

I wrote about “The de facto Nationalization of JPMorgan Chase” in April, 2008, suggesting that when the Federal Reserve helped to plan and finance JP Morgan Chase’s absorption of many of Bear Stearns’ assets and operations, it represented “a major turning point in U.S. financial history.” Subsequent events have corroborated that assessment.

If anyone doubted that Uncle Sam was moving to take charge of the U.S. financial system, those doubts should have been dispelled by the passage of the Dodd-Frank Act in 2010. Dodd-Frank conferredunprecedented leverage over financial institutions through its enforcement arm, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. Through its power to designate the institutions of its choice as “too big to fail” or “systemically important,” and, as I fear we shall see, to effectively dictate policy to firms so designated, the federal government is moving to convert gigantic private corporations into administrative arms of government.

Two recent stories illustrate this point that the trend is moving toward government dominance of Big Finance. The insurance giant, Prudential Financial, attempted to resist the feds designating it a SIFI (the acronym du jour: Systemically Important Financial Institution.) Not a chance. Washington regulators crushed Prudential’s resistance and trampled the principle of federalism by usurping the state insurance regulators that heretofore have overseen Prudential’s operations. According to Richard Liskov’s account in The Wall Street Journal, the feds apparently are devising rules on the fly, having assumed regulatory control over Prudential before the actual regulations have been drafted.

Bandar Bush's mad, mad world

The writing is on the wall for the House of Saud

The Shaker
All signs are showing that the otherwise secretive Saudi regime is angry. Very, very angry. Not only did the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia refuse to take a seat at the UN Security Council, [1] but now the Saudi spy chief, Prince Bandar bin Sultan, appears to be threatening a "major shift" in "relations with the United States at its perceived inaction over the Syria war and its overtures to Iran". 

The Wall Street Journal provides further details:

In the run-up to expected US strikes, Saudi leaders asked for detailed U.S. plans for posting Navy ships to guard the Saudi oil center, the Eastern Province, during any strike on Syria, an official familiar with that discussion said. The Saudis were surprised when the Americans told them U.S. ships wouldn't be able to fully protect the oil region, the official said. 

Disappointed, the Saudis told the U.S. that they were open to alternatives to their long-standing defense partnership, emphasizing that they would look for good weapons at good prices, whatever the source, the official said.

In the second episode, one Western diplomat described Saudi Arabia as eager to be a military partner in what was to have been the U.S.-led military strikes on Syria. As part of that, the Saudis asked to be given the list of military targets for the proposed strikes. The Saudis indicated they never got the information, the diplomat said.

Need a Hand?

Boy Gets Prosthetic Hand Made by 3-D Printer (Cost $5 vs. $30K Medical Device)

by Mike "Mish" Shedlock

What do you do when you cannot afford a $30,000 prosthetic hand that your son needs?
Two years ago, Paul McCarthy began searching for an inexpensive yet functional prosthetic hand for his son Leon, who was born without fingers on one of his hands.
McCarthy came across a video online with detailed instruction on how to use a 3-D printer to make a prosthetic hand for his son. McCarthy made a prosthetic hand for his son for a cost of $5 and free time on a 3D printer.

Link for the video  prosthetic hand made by 3-D printer

Large Mechanical Hand
A "large mechanical hand" invention by Ivan Owen is what kicked off the technological progression to "Robohand".