Free Republic

Back in mid-March, there was a brief scare after the start of the Ukraine conflict, when Fed custody holdings plunged by a record $104.5 billion (if promptly bouncing back the following week), leading many to believe that Russia may have dumped its Treasurys, or at least change its bond custodian. We noted that we wouldn't have a definitive answer until the May TIC number came out to know for sure how much Russia had sold, or if indeed, anything. Moments ago the May TIC numbers did come out, and as expected, Russia indeed dumped a record $26 billion, or some...

Cutting right to the chase: we don't think going short is a good idea yet. Just when you would think the situation with Mt. Gox couldn't get any stranger, it has. Apparently, the exchange "found" almost BTC 200,000 in one of its old wallets this month. The coins would be currently worth approximately $115 million. A statement published yesterday on the exchanges website reads: MtGox Co., Ltd. had certain old-format wallets which were used in the past and which, MtGox thought, no longer held any bitcoins. Following the application for commencement of a civil rehabilitation proceeding, these wallets were rescanned...

Shares of Australian investment firm Macro Energy gained 42% yesterday, after news emerged that it plans to enter the bitcoin space and raise A$9.1m ($8.2m) in funding.

Future generations of Bitcoin billionaires may someday look back on 2014 with knowing smiles. Here was a year when thefts spread, exchanges collapsed, rates gyrated like a teenager’s moods. And yet the buying of bitcoins showed no signs of abating. The past week was particularly extreme. The apparent suicide of an American business executive in Singapore was investigated for possible ties to her Bitcoin investments. A California man fingered as the currency’s mysterious inventor reacted to his sudden fame by asking that journalists buy him lunch. After finishing his meal at a sushi restaurant, he went on to deny any...

Just before the bankruptcy of the Mt. Gox bitcoin digital-money (or virtual-currency) exchange, Japanese finance minister Taro Aso predicted the inevitable failure. “No one recognizes them as a real currency,” he told reporters. “I expected such a thing to collapse.” I totally agree with Mr. Aso. For weeks and weeks I have been tweeting and broadcasting that bitcoin is not real money. It is not a reliable medium of exchange, nor is it a reliable store of value. It has no central-bank regulation, network operations, or even centralized issuance. And because of its wild price fluctuations, bitcoin can never...

U.S. and Japanese regulators are investigating the collapse of the world's largest exchange for trading bitcoins, the virtual currency that has grown in popularity among technophiles for buying products and services online. The separate investigations were launched Wednesday as supporters of the virtual currency insisted that the shutdown of Mt. Gox was only a temporary setback for the novel monetary system. The failure of the Tokyo exchange, which may have included the theft of almost 750,000 bitcoins worth more than $300 million, was seen by critics as derailing prospects for the virtual currency. But several high-profile bitcoin investors came forward...

Ever wonder what a digital bank run looks like? Nearly one million Mt. Gox users are finding out first hand.The Tokyo-based exchange, popular amongst currency traders, has risen in prominence by offering its customers storage services in a variety of currencies. This effectively makes it act as an online bank. One such “currency” that it allows accounts to be denominated in is bitcoin.Yesterday the exchange halted withdrawals of the digital currency, citing a technical malfunction. It promises to reopen for business on February 10th. What many news sources are missing is that this is not a particularly new development –...

WASHINGTON, Jan 29 (Reuters) - The Obama administration is scheduled on Wednesday to launch a retirement savings vehicle called "myRA," aimed at enrolling more Americans in a government-backed investment option. In details provided by the White House on Wednesday, the retirement savings proposal would be similar to a Roth Individual Retirement Account, but with holdings backed by the U.S. government like savings bonds. "MyRA guarantees a decent return with no risk of losing what you put in," President Barack Obama said in introducing the program on Tuesday night in his State of the Union Speech.

You’ve all heard about Bitcoin. No one knows who created it, although some writers have made very educated guesses about the identity of the pseudonymous creator. I have sometimes wondered whether Bitcoin is the product of some transnational criminal organization or rogue state that wants to undermine developed economies by casting their payment systems into doubt. I am less concerned with Bitcoin’s origin than with its flaws. I shall enumerate those flaws forthwith. Bitcoin enables fraud and other criminal activities. This is absolutely the single most salient feature of Bitcoin’s anonymity. Conventional currencies are indeed subject to laundering and counterfeit....

Bitcoin is the name of a group of peer-to-peer payment networks that serve as an open-source form of digital currency that was originally introduced in 2009 by a software developer with the alias of 'Satoshi Nakamoto." Bitcoin currency is created as rewards to "miners" for providing the computing power to solve difficult math problems to maintain the "blockchain" of internet transactions in the currency. Unlike online credit cards and PayPal systems that allow buyers to claim their money back, bitcoin permanently transfers value. The bitcoin cyber-economy compassed of merchants, users, service providers, and startup enterprises has flourished for the past...

Overstock.com – the American internet retailer with over a billion dollars per year in sales – will accept Bitcoin starting in 2014. As Overstock CEO Patrick Byrne told the Financial Times: I think a healthy monetary system at the end of the day isn’t an upside down pyramid based on the whim of a government official, but is based on something that they can’t control. If there’s going to be some part of the population which adopts it… I think that we’ll get that business. And the people who switch to it will respect that we started adopting it. Europe...

China’s biggest Bitcoin exchange, BTCChina, has stopped accepting deposits in Chinese yuan. The shutdown has sent the currency into a downward spin, stripping it of half its value overnight. It is trading at $572 on Mt.Gox, down from a high of about $1,200 last week.

The Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs, chaired by Sen. Tom Carper (D-Del.), is holding the first congressional hearing on the future of Bitcoin. The first panel features senior figures from the Obama administration. And their comments about Bitcoin have been remarkably positive.

Florida Democratic Rep. Alan Grayson lost $18 million in a scheme by a Virginia man that involved over a 100 victims, the congressman’s office confirmed Monday. [Snip] The scheme worked like this: clients would turn over their stocks to Chapman as collateral for a loan, and Chapman would let customers borrow about 90 percent of the stocks' value. If the stocks did badly, borrowers could walk away and keep the money they were loaned. But if the borrowers' stocks did well, they would repay the loan with interest, and Chapman was supposed to return the stocks to the investor at...

According to a recent report by the Congressional Budget Office (CBO), different generations have paid and will continue to pay disparate amounts of Medicare and Social Security payroll taxes, and they will also receive dissimilar amounts of Medicare and...

<p>First of all, let’s call affordable health care what it really is: It’s socialized medicine.</p> <p>I’ve had an opportunity to watch the Canadian version of affordable health care in action with all its limitations with my Canadian husband’s family. A couple of years ago, I was startled to see the cover of Maclean’s, a national Canadian magazine, showing a picture of a horse lying on an MRI table with the headline, “In Canada a horse gets better treatment than you.” It went on to say that young Canadian medical students have no incentive to become doctors to humans because they can’t make any money. Instead, there is a great surge of Canadian students becoming veterinarians. That’s where the money is. A Canadian animal can have timely MRIs, surgeries and any number of tests it needs to receive quality health care.</p>

The dictionary definition of the phrase: "PONZI SCHEME" is as follows: " 1.) An investment swindle in which some early investors are paid off with money put up by later ones in order to encourage more and bigger risks." Have the Democrats pulled a fast one on us by using a Ponzi Scheme to generate insurance premium dollars for their expanding social engineering plans to keep on buying more votes from low information voters?

Lauren Zanardelli and Graham Foster are the kind of customers the government needs to make Obamacare work. The chefs own and operate a bright orange hipster magnet called the Neue Southern Food Truck. The farm-to-table vehicle stands out in Greenville, South Carolina, even among the new gastropubs that dot the city's charming Main Street. Today Zanardelli and Foster are zooming around their rented kitchen on the edge of town, preparing deep-fried Brussels sprouts, Ramen with seaweed and pumpkin sweet rolls. They won't have time after their 12-hour work day to explore the new health insurance marketplaces that opened this morning,...

Grady Memorial, Georgia's biggest hospital, announced today it will lose $45 million dollars a year because of Obamacare.

Pakistan and the International Monetary Fund have reached an initial agreement on a bailout of at least $5.3 billion to stave off an economic crisis as the country's foreign reserves dip perilously low, officials said Thursday. The announcement should help calm fears of financial instability in Pakistan, a nuclear-armed nation of 180 million people that Washington is relying on to combat Islamic militants and negotiate an end to the war in neighboring Afghanistan. The agreement comes less than six years after Pakistan's last IMF bailout, and the driving need for the money this time around was to repay the institution...