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Narrator: Are you in a debt hole so deep you can never climb out? Are all your credit cards maxed out, and are you applying for yet another card just so you can cover living expenses? Does your mortgage payment eat up half your monthly paycheck? Are you still carrying thousands of dollars of student loan debt 10 years or more after you graduated? Or are you a business owner paying so much on your loans that the bank makes more profit from your business than you do? Well, now there’s an answer! Businesses and private citizens can now take...

You don't get something for nothing, You can't have freedom for free, You won't get wise, With the sleep still in your eyes, No matter what your dreams might be, “Something for Nothing” ... The biggest obstacle to economic recovery is ignorance, among the public and in Congress. Even reasonable proposals like those advanced by DeLong are basically frozen out by the strange logic that currently holds sway inside the White House and within the FOMC. In both cases, the idea of real debt restructuring and economic revival is shunned in favor of policy stasis and financial repression. The current...

Not with a bang but with a whimper that is how it shall end for the West: No Weimar like inflation, no Black Mondays just the slow drip of our wealth trickling away. Like frogs in a pot of slow boiling water, our citizens gratefully slide into the warm bath that will slowly cook them. Since recorded history, the brightest minds in the West have sought the Philosopher's Stone, a way to turn junk into nothing. In modern times, our debt addicted elites turn to Financial Repression for their salvation. To the financially responsible, recent central bank actions appear insane...

Financial repression is making a comeback. Bill Gross dedicated his May investment letter to financial repression, and an article by the FT's Gillian Tett described both policymakers and investors refamiliarizing themselves with its tenets.What is "financial repression"? Below is an abridged definition from Reinhart & Rogoff's This Time is Different: Governments force residents to save in banks by giving them few, if any, other options. They then stuff [their] debt into the banks via reserve requirements and other devices. This allows the government to finance a part of its debt at a very low interest rate; financial repression thus constitutes...

Over ONE MILLION copies sold! On the NYTimes Bestseller List for 19 weeks, 12 weeks at #1!Buy it… read it… live it!“Conservatism is the antidote to tyranny precisely because its principles are the founding principles.” --Mark Levin in Liberty and TyrannyWelcome to “The Levin Lounge”… Step in and have a virtual FRink.Taking the country by storm, one radio station at a time – and kicking the BUTTS of the competition! Welcome all, to the most FUN LIVE THREAD on FreeRepublic.com! You can call Mark’s show: 1-877-381-3811

China: where’s the inflation? Jun 15th, 2010 by Michael Pettis /snip .. policymakers can still contain inflation by what economists call financial repression, made possible by their control over the banking system in countries where banks completely dominate the financial system. In the Chinese context, financial repression exists because the vast bulk of Chinese savings is in the form of bank deposits, and the deposit rate is set at extremely low levels. This has the effect of transferring large amounts of income away from net savers, which for the most part consists of Chinese households, and in favor of net...