Free Republic

Yes, capitalism is working ... for the Forbes Global Billionaires whose ranks swelled from 322 in 2000 to 1,826 in 2015. Billionaires control the vast majority of the world’s wealth, 67 billionaires already own half the world’s assets; by 2100 we’ll have 11 trillionaires, while American worker income has stagnated for a generation. But for the vast majority of the world, capitalism is a failure. Over a billion live on less than two dollars a day. In his “Capital in the Twenty-First Century,” economist Thomas Piketty warns the inequality gap is toxic, dangerous. As global population explodes from 7 billion...

Scientists Discover Massive Freshwater Reserves Underneath The Ocean Floor Agence France Presse Dec. 5, 2013, 7:22 AM Australian researchers said Thursday they had established the existence of vast freshwater reserves trapped beneath the ocean floor which could sustain future generations as current sources dwindle. Lead author Vincent Post, from Australia's Flinders University, said that an estimated 500,000 cubic kilometres (120,000 cubic miles) of low-salinity water had been found buried beneath the seabed on continental shelves off Australia, China, North America and South Africa. "The volume of this water resource is a hundred times greater than the amount we've extracted from...

As of Tuesday, the Earth's ecological budget for the year has maxed out. For the rest of the year the planet will operate on an ecological deficit. And it's only August. So claims the Global Footprint Network, which calls today "Earth Overshoot Day," its annual estimate of when human consumption exceeds the planet's ability to regenerate its resources for the year. "It's a bit of a gimmick, I admit," said the group's president Mathis Wankernagel,in a phone interview from Switzerland. "It's not that tomorrow I won't be able to eat potatoes anymore." But, he said, it's meant to make a...

ARROYO GRANDE, Calif. (MarketWatch) -- "One of the disturbing facts of history is that so many civilizations collapse," warns anthropologist Jared Diamond in "Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed." Many "civilizations share a sharp curve of decline. Indeed, a society's demise may begin only a decade or two after it reaches its peak population, wealth and power." Now, Harvard's Niall Ferguson, one of the world's leading financial historians, echoes Diamond's warning: "Imperial collapse may come much more suddenly than many historians imagine. A combination of fiscal deficits and military overstretch suggests that the United States may be the...

Many investors have become contrarians and are now apparently experts in being able to spot bubbles. Hence, they all are fully aware that a bubble exists in agricultural commodities at this juncture. Really, you can listen to just about any financial source and hear some commentator warning about the epic bubble that is evident in agricultural commodity prices. However, some of these same folks were completely blindsided by the collapse of the tech bubble in 2000. And they also were shocked that real estate prices could ever decline in value. Of course, this new class of maverick investor is also...