Free Republic

Gold is up to $1964. Silver is up to $25.54.

The time came when the emperor decreed: “The people are in need; a plague is upon the land. I will give them money.” The people had been made to believe that paper was money. So, the emperor ordered that paper bearing the government insignia be printed and distributed to the people. Now, the people had been trained to accept paper as money, but they still hung onto the belief that even paper money required work to be considered valuable. But the emperor reassured them that paper is money backed by the full faith and credit of government (aka paper money...

Precious metals rallied to their highest levels in years on Tuesday as a fresh economic stimulus in Europe and a weak U.S. dollar boosted prices. Spot gold rose $24.50 to $1,840.40 an ounce, its highest level since Sept. 9, 2011, while silver gained $1.34, hitting a more than 6-year high of $21.46 an ounce. At the same time, the U.S. dollar index slid 0.54 percent and neared its lowest point in two years. Tuesday’s price surge reflected "what happened in Europe,” George Gero, managing director at RBC Global Wealth Management and a member of the COMEX board of directors, told...

LONDON (Reuters) - Gold pushed above $1,800 an ounce on Wednesday for the first time since 2011, with analysts expecting further gains as investors stock up on an asset they expect to hold its value while the coronavirus convulses the global economy. Spot gold prices have surged 40% in the last 14 months and are within striking distance of 2011's record high of $1,920.30 an ounce. "We'll be challenging the $2,000 level by the end of the year," said Ross Norman, an independent analyst. "We are in a bull market for gold." (Graphic: Gold's latest rally, https://fingfx.thomsonreuters.com/gfx/ce/jznpnzmokpl/GR%20RALLY.JPG) Powering the rally...

Deflation picked up in the U.S. in April, pushing consumer prices down 0.8 percent compared with a month earlier, even while food prices soared. The price of gasoline dropped 20.6 percent for the month, the Department of Labor said Tuesday. The prices for clothing, airline travel, cars, recreation, and hotels all plunged while the price of groceries saw its biggest monthly increase since 1974. Compared with a year ago, prices were up 0.3 percent, Core inflation, a measure which subtracts changes in the prices of the volatile food and energy categories, fell 0.4 percent, the steepest decline ever in records...

HBO's Bill Maher pressed House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) on trillions of federal spending on the coronavirus pandemic, with the "Real Time" host saying a "house of cards" will eventually collapse, resulting in a depression. The back-and-forth comes as President Trump signed off on a $484 billion package on Friday to replenish a small business lending program prompted by the pandemic. The package also provides $100 billion for hospitals and COVID-19 testing as some states slowly reopen their economies. "I know we can bail out certain sectors as we have done in the past, I don't know how you can...

According to the U.S. Treasury, as of February 29, 2020, there was $16.9 trillion in marketable U.S. Treasury securities outstanding. Of that amount, at the end of February, the Federal Reserve held $2.47 trillion or 14.6 percent – making it, by far, the largest single holder of U.S. Treasuries anywhere in the world. ...But exactly how can a so-called “free market” function smoothly if the country’s own central bank is cornering the market. Salomon Brothers paid a $290 million fine and came close to getting slapped with criminal charges by the U.S. Department of Justice in 1992 for manipulating prices...

I know very little of these things. I'm an English teacher, and a mathematical cripple. But it seems to me our economy could shrink to a point where tying our money back to gold might be possible. I'm asking Freepers because most of you know more about this than I do. So... what do folks here think?

The Democrats offer the free world, that cares about American greatness, the leadership choice spectacle of a spendthrift socialist with a recent heart attack a wide range of plans for bankrupting America and a sleepy old hasbeen who cannot be relied upon to remember his own name for the next four and a half let alone lead. They do have one better candidate than either of these two guys, but she is honest with them and does principled things like not voting for a rabidly partisan impeachment, so the DNC shuts her out of its debates. The good side of...

The Federal Reserve, saying “the coronavirus outbreak has harmed communities and disrupted economic activity in many countries, including the United States,” cut interest rates to zero on Sunday and launched a massive $700 billion quantitative easing program to shelter the economy from the effects of the virus. Facing highly disrupted financial markets, the Fed also slashed the rate of emergency lending at the discount window for banks by 125 bps to 0.25%, and lengthened the term of loans to 90 days. The Fed also cut reserve requirement ratios for thousands of banks to zero. In addition, in a global coordinated...

President Donald Trump's new budget confirms that without corrective action, trillion-dollar deficits will be with us for years and perhaps decades to come. Trump's budget plan has many smart and urgent spending reforms. But will Congress ignore them once again? Alas, probably, but the longer we wait, the shorter the debt bomb fuse. But step one in solving this crisis is to recognize the facts about it and to dispel the pervasive mythologies about what caused this ocean of systemic borrowing and how best to deal with it. Myth 1: Trump created these deficits. No, no, no. These were the...

The White House on Sunday unveiled a $4.8 trillion budget proposal that would slash spending dramatically on foreign aid and social safety nets, while including $2 billion for a southern border wall and substantially boosting funding to NASA, the Department of Veterans Affairs and the Department of Homeland Security.

Some critical thinking here, the author dissects "inflation" then concludes we need crypto currency

... For years Congress has had the Internal Revenue Service adjust tax brackets and other provisions for inflation. (Revisions for 2020 are in the accompanying tables, and now is a good time to review them.) But it’s equally important to remember key tax numbers that aren’t changing for 2020—because Congress hasn’t indexed them for inflation. And while inflation has been low recently, it hasn’t gone away. As a result, millions of Americans are paying more to Uncle Sam because there’s no indexing for a variety of tax provisions, including homeowner benefits, tax thresholds on Social Security and investment benchmarks among...

President Trump on Friday signed two spending packages totaling $1.4 trillion, averting a government shutdown at midnight. The bills included all 12 annual appropriations bills for the 2020 fiscal year that started Oct. 1. They also included a slew of tax cuts, extending expiring and expired tax breaks and eliminating other taxes that amount to an additional $426 billion in lost revenue, bringing the total cost of the bill to more than $1.8 trillion. The government spent the first quarter of the fiscal year operating on stopgap funding that was set to expire on Friday. Trump reportedly signed the bill...

In my days before I worked for the Mises Institute, I had a colleague who knew I associated with Austrian-School economists. In the wake of the bailouts and quantitative easing that followed the 2008 financial crisis, he'd sometimes crack "where's all that inflation you Austrians keep talking about?" But then, in the very same conversation, he'd remark with dismay on how much housing-price increases had outpaced household income in the region. He didn't need an answer from me. He'd found some of "that inflation" all on his own. Price Changes Are Not Homogeneous These exchanges illustrated some of the blind...

[Volcker's] obituaries were disappointing for them almost uniformly promoting the fiction of Volcker as inflation slayer. Such a view doesn’t square with simple economic history. Indeed, explicit in the accepted wisdom that Volcker was “inflation’s worst enemy” (Hoover Institution’s John Taylor) is that economic growth causes inflation. As Phillips Curve devotee Neil Irwin put it in the New York Times, Volcker allegedly beat inflation “at the cost of what would become the worst recession in the seven decades between the Great Depression and the global financial crisis.” In the analysis of seemingly everyone, job loss and greatly reduced prosperity were...

ThereÂ’s a sense that the bureaucrats who command the federal leviathan work for themselves, not for the country at large. That wasnÂ’t true of Paul Volcker. Since his death last week, Paul Volcker has been heavily eulogized. ThatÂ’s not the purpose here. In these trying times, AmericansÂ’ faith in our nationÂ’s institutions is at historic lows. Once-vaunted organizations like the FBI now struggle to command a majority of AmericansÂ’ support.The causes for this are legion. But there is a general sense that the vast federal appendages created in the last 100 years have little connection to the interests of...

Watchdog blames ‘administrative bloat’As the issue of college affordability continues to be a prominent talking point on the campaign trail ahead of the 2020 presidential election, a new study shows that the cost of a college education is still increasing at a rate that far outpaces inflation.The study, put out by the financial technology company Self, found that on average, college costs have risen $2,835 since 2015, increasing 112 percent more than the rate of inflation during the same period.“While it is somewhat understandable for universities to increase costs in line with inflation, especially when you consider the number of...

Fed Admits Failure of ‘Plan A’ to Control Money Market Rates, Shifts Back to Repos (which was ‘Plan A’ till 2008) The hullabaloo in the repo market torpedoed the function of Interest on Excess Reserves and forced the Fed to go back to the future. With its announcement this morning, the New York Fed confirmed that the Fed’s Plan A of manipulating the federal funds rate into its target range – now between 1.75% and 2.0% — has miserably failed, and that it will switch to Plan B to control short-term interest rates. But this Plan B used to...