Tag: WND

WND column

This is what I am referring to in today’s WND column. It succinctly shows the death of Keynesian economics in one simple graph. The empiricists who have rejected the compelling but non-empirical critiques of the Austrian School for eighty years will not find it so easy to dismiss the empirical evidence of the declining marginal utility of debt.

There will be no double-dip but only because the “recession” never ended. It was merely disguised due to the ludicrous metric of GDP which counts government borrowing and spending as economic growth. To insist that GDP growth is economic growth is to confuse the map with the territory.

WND column

Social Conservatives on Steroids

It is a basic principle of socionomics that economic boom times are strongly correlated with social liberalism, while economic contractions tend to be accompanied by social conservatism. This has been observed over thousands of years; the Lex Oppia of 215 B.C. was the most famous of the sumptuary laws that were passed by the Roman republic in response to the recession that took place during the second Punic war. Twenty years later, with Carthage defeated and the launch of a huge investment boom based on conquest and colonization, the Lex Oppia was repealed after the women of Rome rioted for days over the right to display their wealth in the same manner as non-Roman women.

WND column

You Were Warned

The ECRI’s Weekly Leading Indicators has now fallen eight consecutive weeks and has been below -10 for two consecutive weeks. … [T]here has never been a WLI plunge in history of this depth and duration, nor any dip at all below -10 that has not been associated with a recession.
– Mike Shedlock, ECRI WLI in Negative Territory, July 31, 2010

The percent change from the preceding year in real GDP was revised down for all 3 years: from 2.1 percent to 1.9 percent for 2007, from an increase of 0.4 percent to 0.0 percent for 2008, and from a decrease of 2.4 percent to a decrease of 2.6 percent for 2009.
– Bureau of Economic Analysis, Revised Estimates: 2007 through First Quarter 2010, July 30, 2010

As the government statisticians revise their statistics downward and the leading indicators suggest that the so-called recovery is nothing more than an artifact of massive federal borrowing and spending, I thought it would be useful to revisit the scenario that I considered to be the most likely when I finished writing “The Return of the Great Depression” thirteen months ago. Given the advantage of one year of hindsight, I see absolutely no reason to change my conclusion regarding the ongoing global economic contraction. “It is not over. It has only begun.”

WND column

Better Late than Never

Being one of the many columnists who initially supported the invasion of Iraq under the mistaken impression that Saddam Hussein had violated a ceasefire agreement with the United States (although I did argue that it should not be undertaken in the absence of a declaration of war), I am in no position to criticize Mr. Farah or anyone else for taking a long time to come around to the understanding that the military occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq must come to an immediate end.

Only a very few commentators, such as Antiwar.com’s Justin Raimondo and WorldNetDaily’s own Pat Buchanan and Ilana Mercer, can truly say that they were opposed from the start to the expensive, unconstitutional and ultimately useless abuses of the American military that have been inflicted upon it by Republican and Democratic commanders in chief over the last nine years. And even fewer opinion writers are man enough to admit in public that their previously expressed opinions were incorrect. Farah, to his credit, is not afraid to do so.

“For the life of me, I cannot begin to understand our objectives in either Iraq or Afghanistan any more. … I admit I was a supporter of both of these campaigns. I was obviously wrong.”
– Joseph Farah, Where are protests of Obama’s wars?, July 22, 2010.

WND column

Matches for Arsonists

It is of paramount importance to every individual in a modern civilized community that banking credit should have the same solidity as coined money.
– Charles Connant, “Principles of Money and Banking,” 1905

In The Return of the Great Depression, I predicted that “the consensus scenario will gradually transform from Green Shoots into Jobless Recovery, which will remain the mainstream consensus until it begins to become apparent in the autumn of 2010 that even Jobless Recovery is too optimistic.”

It would appear I was somewhat too optimistic myself despite my frequent contentions that we are passing through the early stages of a large-scale economic contraction that will last more than a decade. It is only summer, and yet already the dread “double-dip” term is being regularly bandied about, while the last champion of Neo-Keynesian economics, Paul Krugman, has begun to hedge his bets by complaining that the two previous stimulus packages were too small and talking about “the third depression.”

WND column

Winning the War Against Men, part II

In every large-scale military conflict, there is the macro war and the micro war. While the macro war fought strategically by the generals has a great influence on the micro war fought tactically by the individual soldiers, the two wars are nevertheless distinct from one another and must be contemplated separately. In this second column in the series related to the war against men, I am focused solely on the micro war that is fought in the houses, classrooms, churches and night clubs of America.

In the prelude to a battle, the local commander always considers four things. His resources, the enemy’s resources, the lay of the land and the objective. Now, every male individual’s objective will naturally be different: One man may hope to meet a large number of attractive women, another man might wish to marry a specific woman and a third might wish to escape a hellish marriage without spending the rest of his life in court-dictated financial servitude. But regardless of the objective, the same general rules about the lay of the land and the relative value table will apply.

WND column

What Are You Celebrating?

The fourth of July is the day to celebrate American independence from the Kingdom of Great Britain. But what is the significance of independence from Great Britain when America is kept in dependence by Washington, D.C., and in the case of 11* once-sovereign states, forcibly so?

*This should have been 12. I had forgotten about the forcible seizure and illegal occupation of the sovereign kingdom of Hawaii. Mea culpa.

WND column

Winning the War Against Men

There is a relentless war being waged against American men that literally spans the entire extent of their lives. From the womb, in which a woman’s “right” to abort a male baby for being male is defended but a similar right to abort a female baby for being female is vehemently opposed, to the grave, wherein the disparate impact of old age is ignored despite women living 5.2 years longer than men on the average, men are systematically, structurally and unstintingly under assault.

Most men understand this on some level, but like the nice dependable man who can’t figure out why attractive women repeatedly reject him in favor of unemployed losers with criminal records, they are incapable of doing anything about it because they simply can’t believe that women truly do not think or behave like men. Because they want to believe that women are “the civilizing force,” their “better halves” or “the fair sex,” they are constitutionally incapable of seeing what is, from a rational male perspective, the seething cauldron of amoral solipsism behind the collective pretty face.

WND column

The Bank Failure Recovery

“Regulators on Friday shut down a Nevada bank, raising to 83 the number of U.S. bank failures this year. The 83 closures so far this year is more than double the pace set in all of 2009, which was itself a brisk year for shutdowns. By this time last year, regulators had closed 40 banks. The pace has accelerated as banks’ losses mount on loans made for commercial property and development.”
– June 19, 2010, the Associated Press

According to the many expert economists who completely failed to see the financial crisis of 2008 or the subsequent economic contraction coming, the American economy is no longer in a recession but is nearly a year into a recovery. However, it is worth noting that the National Bureau of Economic Research’s Business Cycle Dating Committee, which is the government committee charged with delineating the official beginnings and ends of recessions, has refused thus far to state that the economic contraction that began in 2008 is, in fact, over.

While the GDP figures are positive, other statistics such as the unemployment rate, the velocity of the money supply and the ongoing reduction of debt in the financial and household sectors strongly indicate that the supposed recovery is nothing more than a statistical artifact that is the direct result of a 57 percent increase in outstanding federal debt since the second quarter of 2008. Since government spending is a primary component of the GDP equation, the G in C+I+G+(X-M), literally all of the reported growth in GDP is the result of the increase in outstanding federal debt from $5.2 trillion on June 30, 2008, to $8.3 trillion on March 31, 2010.

Addendum: Here is another piece of evidence that the so-called recovery is nothing more than an artifact of the massive increase in federal borrowing and spending.  Notice how far below the average historical 2% increase the three private sectors have fallen and remember that the Finance sector alone is twice as large as the Federal sector.

WND column

Nine Years of Futility

In December 1979, the USSR invaded Afghanistan with 80,000 soldiers supported by 1,800 tanks. The government of Afghan President Hafizullah Amin was overthrown in less than a week at a minimal cost of only 86 fatalities. However, Marshal Sokolov was unable to establish control outside the major population centers, and despite reinforcements that increased its total occupation force to 100,000 troops, 80 percent of the country remained outside the control of its military or its puppet government. Over the 10 years of the failed occupation, Soviet forces lost an average of 1,445 dead annually (63 percent of which were combat-related), until they finally retreated in a two-stage, largely peaceful withdrawal that was completed in February 1989.