Free Republic

One view of what caused the Great Depression in the 1930s is that the Federal Reserve failed to prevent a collapse in the money supply. This is the famous thesis of Milton Friedman's and Anna Schwartz's A Monetary History of the United States, 1867-1960, and it was, more or less, the view of Ben Bernanke when he was chairman of the Federal Reserve. The global economy today resembles that of the 1930s in several ominous ways. Financial author Edward Chancellor recently called attention to a paper written by Caludio Borio, head economist at the Bank of International Settlements, that provides...

The “infamy” of December 7, 1941, is deeper than most Americans have ever imagined. The Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor was almost certainly the result of a Soviet plot—“Operation Snow”—carried out by Harry Dexter White, a figure of enormous influence in the Roosevelt administration and a known Soviet spy. Americans remember Pearl Harbor as the work of a Japanese military machine hell-bent on a war of conquest. The truth is more complicated. The imperial regime had faced severe political shocks throughout the 1930s. Two attempts on the life of Emperor Hirohito—one by a Japanese communist whose father was a member...

BEGIN TRANSCRIPT RUSH: I mentioned to you last week that I had a story about how what we are living through right now is actually worse than the Great Depression and why nobody knows. I went back to my archives, and I got that story, and I have it here. Open borders, bigger government, free college for everybody. How many people already have free college by virtue of having their student loans forgiven or what have you? Everything these people have tried has not worked, so they want to try even more of it. "Bigger welfare state. Get rid of...

The Dems want to pin the Confederate Flag, KKK, Great Depression, urban decay, and harsh marriage laws on the GOP... pin the tale on the Donkey instead!

I don't know too much about Jim Rickards, just found this to be an interesting video about the overall economy and some tidbits about what our government agencies are up to. The video is a 45 minutes long interview of sorts and discussion. Just posting in the event other are interested.

Fred Ross's change-making Axioms for Organizers is updated for the Internet age, and for a new generation battling discrimination and police brutality.Most residents of Ferguson, Missouri, have probably never heard of Fred Ross, Sr., but they could use his help now. Ferguson's population is two-thirds African American, but the mayor, almost all members of the city council and school board, and 95 percent of the police department is white, and in last year's municipal election only 7 percent of blacks came to the polls. Ross—perhaps the most influential (but little-known) community organizer in American history—had a successful career mobilizing people...

Inflation has been notably absent from the economy this summer, despite bullish moves in gold and a continued debate over the tapering of asset purchases by the Federal Reserve. According to Art Cashin, director of floor operations at UBS Financial Services, the central bank's effect on the financial system has worrying parallels to the period leading up to the Great Depression. "The weak data that we've gotten, particularly the housing on Friday, hints that tapering may be held back or may not be a factor, " Cashin told "Squawk on the Street" on Monday. "Many of the proponents of gold...

Unemployment is not getting better, it’s getting worse. Even the establishment media is taking notice. “Widely followed pollster Gallup puts the nation's unemployment rate at an ugly 8.6 percent in August,” reports CNBC, “a startling jump from the 7.8 percent the organization recorded for July. When counting the underemployed, the rate zooms to 17.7 percent, off its 2013 high of 18.2 percent.” If you count in those who have dropped out of the work force, you get closer to 24 percent unemployment. Gee, and all this time I thought that the job situation was getting better. That’s what we were...

For staggering sum of $47 trillion dollars, one would think that perhaps this administration could afford a soundtrack under their reckless spending, like the 1970’s Bionic Man had when his binary powers took over. An original-score sound bed would add drama and color to the spending. The theatrical effect would be that it would make us feel like the spending was doing something. Instead, all Obama got us was the royalty-free laugh track. Through 2023 the Office of Management and Budget reports that the accumulated spending by the federal government since the One took over will be $46.5 trillion under...

Lovers of Big Government and apologists for debt like Paul Krugman have tried to paint Milton Friedman as a contradiction. They say that Friedman’s insight that more Fed intervention might have mitigated the Great Depression is inconsistent with his view that the Depression would have been less severe without the Fed. Krugman can typically be discounted because his partisanship diminishes his perceptiveness. It is, however, disappointing when National Review joins the fray and publishes opinion claiming that Friedman “would likely have supported a much more aggressive monetary response to our economic downturn.” Professor Ivan Pongracic of Hillsdale College explains that...

Ninety years ago today, on August 2, 1923, President Warren G. Harding died at the Palace Hotel in San Francisco, California. It was sudden, shocking, and has been fodder for conspiracy theorists ever since. His wife, Florence—described derisively by some as “The Duchess”—didn’t allow an autopsy, so we’ll never know exactly what caused the demise of the 29th President of the United States. It might have been congestive heart failure, or food poisoning, or even something more sinister. Seen in retrospect, through the prism of the scandals associated with his White House tenure, Harding is usually ranked well toward the...

When libertarian scholar Peter Ferrara asked rhetorically in Sunday’s issue of Forbes, “Economically, Could Obama Be America’s Worst President?” he relied heavily on statistics provided by the chief enabler of the Great Recession, the Federal Reserve. Noting that the policies of President Obama have done nothing to stimulate the economy but plenty to keep it from growing, he used recent economic recoveries as prime examples of what recoveries would look like if government would stay out of the way: The right measure and comparison for Obama’s record is not to compare the recovery to the recession, but to compare Obama’s...

Yesterday, my colleague, Marty Biancuzzo, explained why America is on a path to inevitable economic and government collapse. After reading Marty’s piece, another colleague asked me: What will America look like after a government collapse? It’s an important question, and I want to give a satisfactory answer. But I can’t do that in one short column, so I plan to return to this topic several times over the next few weeks. I hope that when I’m done, you will have a better understanding of where the country is headed. Now, consider our current situation… It’s clear that Barack Obama and...

<p>Europe in 2013 has recovered worse from its slump than Europe in 1935. Again, great work, guys.</p>

Unofficial millennial spokesperson Lena Dunham, while incisive and entertaining, is not the voice of my generation. On Dunham's buzzy dramedy Girls, self-involved twenty-somethings balk at $12 salads by day and guzzle $14 cocktails by night while parents bankroll their "groovy lifestyles." It's an enticing narrative. But these stereotypes fail to recognize some rapidly evolving trends among young echo boomers entering adulthood. Millennials, typically defined as anyone born after 1980, make up an enormous and diverse generation, but many of them share a common experience — entering adulthood during the country's greatest economic downturn since the 1930s. The financial duress of...

In 1929, Deflation Started In Europe Before Overtaking The U.S. Economics / DeflationNov 30, 2012 - 05:23 AM By: EWI What Happens in Europe Will Not Stay in Europe More than 1,500 years after the fact, scholars still debate the causes of the Roman Empire's fall. What historians do agree on is that the crumbling empire's final days were marked by economic contraction, a struggle to fund Rome's routine affairs and excessive debt. Sound familiar? Mark Twain said, "History doesn't repeat itself, but it does rhyme." That quote seems to apply when economically comparing the Roman Empire and the United...

The Department of Labor's WARN (Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification) website may have been exempt from layoff notices related to the fiscal cliff, but it still provides a sufficiently (bleak) complete picture about the real nature of layoffs and business cycle in general in America's busiest city. Which is why it was precisely using the WARN website that we learned that one of New York's most historic steakhouses, "NY's Prime Steakhouse since 1927" Gallagher's, located on 52nd street, and which survive the great depression, is shutting down on January 16. Surely neither the surging price of meat, nor the ability...

If you want to understand how the United States became the most prosperous society in the world, start with the ballpoint pen. László Bíró, a Hungarian who had fled the Nazis and gone to Argentina, invented the first working solid-ink pen. When the owner of Goldblatt’s department store in Chicago showed the contraption to a passing salesman named Milton Reynolds, Reynolds decided he could do it better. The year was 1944. American factories were producing a warplane every five minutes, 150 tons of steel every hour, eight aircraft carriers a month. Milton Reynolds knew nothing about this kind of heavy...

Thanks Obama - Here Are 24 Stats That Show How Much You Have Royally Messed Up Our Economy By Michael Snyder August 23st, 2012 Under Barack Obama, the U.S. economy has performed worse than it did under any other president since the end of the Great Depression. After every other recession since World War II, the U.S. economy always regained what was lost and got even stronger before the next recession began. During this "economic recovery", we have not even come close to getting back to where we were in 2008. In fact, the number of Americans living in poverty...

America is headed for a fiscal cliff if members of Congress fail to act before the end of the year. Many economists agree that if no action is taken, 2013 will begin with a $600 billion drag on the economy, or a 4 to 5 percent hit to GDP, due to a combination of tax hikes and budget cuts set to take effect. To put that in perspective, the knock to economic growth could be twice as much as current GDP growth forecasts for all of 2012 and more than any annual GDP growth in the last decade. Former Treasury...