[American Thinker] "Balance and control government activity, which always tends to want more power. Force our government to live within the bounds of our Constitution. For the Constitution explicitly limits the power and scope of only the government. It does so to protect the inalienable rights and freedom of the individual citizen."
Monetary Policy implementation is bipolar. The Federal Reserve tightens through interest rate increases and concurrently stimulates with excess money supply (liquidity). These two activities are diametrically opposed. Yet they happen by the hand of one federal agency, the Federal Reserve’s Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC).
The net effect: Inflation, due to excess money supply, is decimating the buying power of the dollar. Simultaneously, interest rates are bludgeoning business expansion through higher costs of debt. Financial institution margins compress due to the squeeze in spread between long and short rates.
Long interest rates (market-driven) have not gone up nearly as much as the Fed raised short rates (Fed Fund Rate). The yield curve remains inverted, further suggesting a recession.
All recessions are a monetary phenomenon, according to Milton Friedman and through economic observation. Why the Fed decided to put us into a recession is curious. Recessions hurt the private economy and citizen. Recessions don’t hurt bureaucrats or government workers. If the bureaucrat can’t get paid through raising taxes, they print money.
The excessive supply of money was created by placing our nation into massive debt (sale of Treasury Bonds). That debt will be paid back by every working citizen through taxes, further depressing the individual’s ability to stand on his own. That debt was incurred because our government decided to create massive spending programs for entitlements, welfare, student loan forgiveness, COVID relief, and green energy subsidies like E.V.s.
If one believes that the government is the solution for every problem (collectivists, socialists, communists, fascists, democracy, the left), then why not crush the antithesis of the government — namely, private enterprise and free citizens working in the private economy by causing a recession brought on by federal monetary policy. This is not a bias along party lines. Many Republicans exhibit these tendencies, as do most Democrats.
#1
interest rates are bludgeoning business expansion through higher costs of debt
Strange how banks are paying 'savers' 0.04% interest. Couldn't be because the banks no longer see it as a source to fund their business since the Treasury and Fed give them all they ask for.
[Mises Institute] Carl Menger is widely recognized as one of the economists leading the so-called marginalist revolution along with William Stanley Jevons and Léon Walras. There are two other contributions by Menger that are relatively underappreciated and are vital for making sense of the socioeconomic order, including why mankind remains so lost in economic ignorance and tribalistic warmongering.
They are, first, his insights into the proper method or way to study the economy or social order and its emergence-evolution, and second, his application of such wisdom to explain the evolution of money and the entire socioeconomic order that further emerges thanks to money. Let’s further expand on these two.
Menger wrote an entire book devoted to discussing the proper method with which to study the social sciences, aptly titled Investigations into the Methods of the Social Sciences. So how should we study the social sciences according to Menger? He writes,
Natural organisms almost without exception exhibit, when closely observed, a really admirable functionality of all parts with respect to the whole, a functionality which is not, however, the result of human calculation, but of a natural process. Similarly we can observe in numerous social institutions a strikingly apparent functionality with respect to the whole. But with closer consideration they still do not prove to be the result of an intention aimed at this purpose, Le., the result of an agreement of members of society or of positive legislation. They, too, present themselves to us rather as "natural" products (in a certain sense), as unintended results of historical development. One needs, e.g., only to think of the phenomenon of money, an institution which to so great a measure serves the welfare of society, and yet in most nations, by far, is by no means the result of an agreement directed at its establishment as a social institution, or of positive legislation, but is the unintended product of historical development. One needs only to think of law, of language, of the origin of markets, the origin of communities and of states, etc. Now if social phenomena and natural organisms exhibit analogies with respect to their nature, their origin, and their function, it is at once clear that this fact cannot remain without influence on the method of research in the field of the social sciences in general and economics in particular. . . . Now if state, society, economy, etc., are conceived of as organisms, or as structures analogous to them, the notion of following directions of research in the realm of social phenomena similar to those followed in the realm of organic nature readily suggests itself. The above analogy leads to the idea of theoretical social sciences analogous to those which are the result of theoretical research in the realm of the physico-organic world, to the conception of an anatomy and physiology of "social organisms" of state, society, economy, etc.
Like Herbert Spencer, his contemporary and arguably the most famous and influential intellectual of the late 1800s, Menger too felt like the social order was akin to a "social organism" and should be studied using an organic or evolutionary approach similar to how we study the biological order. Menger thus felt like the methods of the physical sciences, like their use of mathematics, was as inappropriate for understanding the monumental complexity and evolution of the social order as it was for the biological one. He writes, "I do not belong to the believers in the mathematical method as a way to deal with our science. . . . Mathematics is not a method for . . . economic research."
[American Thinker] Who would or could have predicted that our own representatives in Congress would vote to allow the government to spy on American citizens without warrants?
Of course, all the Democrats voted to extend the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA).
The Democrat party has fully morphed into a Marxist cabal, ready and willing to impose tyranny on American citizens.
But how do we explain the Republicans who capitulated to the left and voted 'yes' for the two-year extension? Even House Speaker Mike Johnson, and Reps. Matt Gaetz and Anna Paulina Luna flipped.
They will say it was the lesser of the evils, two years instead of five, but that is no excuse. The bill to extend should not have passed and Rep. Andy Biggs’s amendment to require warrants if it did should have passed, but did not.
It seems that small-government, conservative, Americans have very few actual representatives in Congress.
Speaker Johnson has not kept any of the promises he made to obtain his office. He was all in on what was essentially Rep. Nancy Pelosi’s latest big spending bill.
The promise to defeat warrantless surveillance of Americans was likewise broken.
Apparently, Attorney General Merrick Garland made numerous phone calls to wavering reps. One can only wonder if this is how those calls went: "This is how you will vote and if you don’t, this is what will happen. ...." It is beginning to dawn on the American people that it is the deep state that runs the country and they run it with leverage and blackmail. Are Gaetz’s feet made of clay like all the others who have betrayed their constituents?
We know that the Obama administration and his worker bees in the DOJ, FBI and CIA abused FISA throughout the Obama and Trump administrations.
#1
They will say it was the lesser of the evils, two years instead of five
Curious.
AT suggests capitulation.
I suggest push it past the election after which it may be fully revisited. Before that, for the next two years we may really need inspection powers.
[PJ] After the missile and drone attack launched by Iran against Israel on Saturday, one can assume the Pentagon is concerned about an expansion of this hot war. The question of how much Joe Biden and his puppet master, Barack Obama, care remains unanswered, however (where is that Rashid Khalidi tape anyway, LA Times?).
Biden's persistent undermining of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and the president's political left flank calling for Bibi's ouster during a war have been politically punctilious, outrageous, and deflating. They telegraph the administration's antipathy toward the Israeli leader and desire for him to fail in his country's quest for survival.
After all this, you can understand why many question Biden's alleged "ironclad" support of the Jewish state.
Whether Biden takes this missile attack against Israel seriously is one question, but there's little question the Pentagon is on full alert about the possibility of World War III breaking out.
How do we know this? Not because of any national address by the President of the United State of America. Though he came back to the White House for his situation room photo op, he's been silent on the matter.
#7
Look, G. I get you don't buy the Bible. Maybe I don't too. That said the US / NATO isn't going to use nukes over Ukraine even if the Russians do.
Posted by: M. Murcek ||
04/15/2024 10:28 Comments ||
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#8
And yes, the final war will be in the toilet called the middle east.
Posted by: M. Murcek ||
04/15/2024 10:42 Comments ||
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#9
Have you ever thought it just a little bit hypocritical to be backing Russia's invasion and atrocities in Ukraine, while asking for support when the same is done to Israel? Just a tiny bit? (for G...)
#10
Nero. Ukraine/Nato are an aggressor just as Iran/Paleosimians are an aggressor. Claiming that Ukraine is a victim is as much hypocracy as claiming that Gaza is a victim.
A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.
Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.
Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has
dominated Mexico for six years.
Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No
trees were destroyed in the production of this weblog. We did hurt some, though. Sorry.
[PJ] After the missile and drone attack launched by Iran against Israel on Saturday, one can assume the Pentagon is concerned about an expansion of this hot war. The question of how much Joe Biden and his puppet master, Barack Obama, care remains unanswered, however (where is that Rashid Khalidi tape anyway, LA Times?). 
