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The short version of the story is that a 1970s deal cemented the US dollar as the only currency to buy and sell crude oil, and from that monopoly on the all-important oil trade the US dollar slowly but surely became the reserve currency for global trades in most commodities and goods. Massive demand for US dollars ensued, pushing the dollar's value up, up, and away. In addition, countries stored their excess US dollars savings in US Treasuries, giving the US government a vast pool of credit from which to draw.

Snow drifts reaching up to rooftops kept tens of thousands of villagers prisoners in their own homes Saturday as the death toll from Europe's big freeze rose past 550. More heavy snow fell on the Balkans and in Italy, while the Danube river, already closed to shipping for hundreds of kilometres (miles) because of thick ice, froze over in Bulgaria for the first time in 27 years. Montenegro's capital of Podgorica was brought to a standstill by snow 50 centimetres (20 inches) deep, a 50-year record, closing the city's airport and halting rail services to Serbia because of an avalanche....

Published: January 27, 2012 - 12:34 AM First Energy's Bay Shore facility No.3 is seen in Toledo. ( The Blade/Lori King via AP ) View More Photos >> FirstEnergy closing 6 coal-fired power plants January 27,2012 05:00 AM GMT Bob Downing Beacon Journal Publishing Co. Copyright � 2012 Beacon Journal Publishing Co. Inc and Black Press. All Rights Reserved. Any copying, redistribution or retransmission of any of the contents of this service without the express written consent of the Akron Beacon Journal is expressly prohibited. FirstEnergy Corp. on Thursday announced it is retiring six coal-fired power plants, including four in...

THE DAWN OF THE ENERGY AGE February 09, 2012 3:35 PM I'm sure that I've written things that you didn't agree with and probably thought were downright crazy. Well, strap yourself in, because I'm about to take crazy to a whole new level: Within five years, the number of gas customers for the Middleboro Gas & Electric Department will start to plummet. Within 10 to 15 years, there won't be a single customer remaining for either gas or electric. The year 2012 will be looked at by future historians as the dawn of a new age of man -...

Valentine Byler vs. the IRS "Pay Unto Caesar - The Amish & Social Security" Many people think the Amish do not pay taxes. They do. But they have been exempted from paying Social Security. This story is little known to the general public today. It is full of drama, clashes with the government, issues of religious freedom, politics, and much more. For writing this 5-part series, I was privileged to have access to many original materials and personal letters.(To read each section of the series individually, click on the following bookmarks, or read on for the entire series.) Part One:...

Yesterday's announcement by President Obama (headlined at the White House's website as "Remarks by the President on Preventive Care") of planned revisions to an ObamaCare-driven rule which, in the President's words, "if a woman’s employer is a charity or a hospital that has a religious objection to providing contraceptive services as part of their health plan, the insurance company -– not the hospital, not the charity -– will be required to reach out and offer the woman contraceptive care free of charge, without co-pays and without hassles." Showing just how out of touch the establishment press is with reality, an...

Home > News Though most of today's nuclear reactors are cooled by water, we've long known that there are alternatives; in fact, the world's first nuclear-powered electricity in 1951 came from a reactor cooled by sodium. Reactors cooled by liquid metals such as sodium or lead have a unique set of abilities that may again make them significant players in the nuclear industry. At the U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE) Argonne National Laboratory, a team led by senior nuclear engineer James Sienicki has designed a new small reactor cooled by lead—the Sustainable Proliferation-resistance Enhanced Refined Secure Transportable Autonomous Reactor, or...

I am saddened to report that Michael Pettis' site China Financial Markets has been blocked. The link redirects to a site with a one line message "This Account Has Been Suspended". When I have more details, I will post them. Note: I just heard back from Pettis who is unsure of what happened. Hopefully this will be cleared up soon. I am leaving the rest of this post as I originally wrote it. This is really a shame because Pettis is invariably a great read. I am personally indebted because he has taught me most of what I know about...

About three weeks ago, Barack Obama nixed the Keystone XL pipeline that would have transported 900,000 barrels of oil per day from the Canadian tar sands to the gulf coast region of the U.S.  The pipeline project would also create 20,000 direct jobs and potentially hundreds of thousands of indirect jobs according to economic analysis.   Spurned by Obama's rejection, Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper stated that if Canada's next door neighbor and close ally didn't want Canada's oil, then he'd pursue other markets to "diversify" the market for Canada's natural resources.  It didn't take him long. Harper was in Beijing...

My Cato colleague John Cochrane – who is way smarter than I am — has a generally excellent op-ed in today’s Wall Street Journal on ObamaCare’s contraception mandate: Salting mandated health insurance with birth control is exactly the same as a tax—on employers, on Catholics, on gay men and women, on couples trying to have children and on the elderly—to subsidize one form of birth control…The tax rate and spending debates that occupy the media are a small part of the effective taxes and spending that the government achieves by these regulatory mandates…The natural compromise is simple: Birth control, abortion and other...

The deformed heart of monstrous Obamacare is sick and secularist social engineering. Modern liberalism is willfulness writ large -- a godless ideology that rests upon the caprice of central planners. Under it, the fluctuating and often frightening desires of corrupt men, rather than the changeless will of a caring God, form the shaky measure of "good government." As the grim chapters of recent history show -- chapters written in the blood of millions of unborn children and other "undesirables" -- taking God out of "goodness" drains the term of any coherent meaning, leaving mankind at the mercy of power-seeking ideologues....

As the Obama administration signals its willingness to make others pay for the birth- control-and-abortion rope that liberals are fashioning to hang the Catholic Church, another embattled Catholic group is fending off a different attack on freedom of religion.  This one too is just another secular assault in the name of the liberal goal ensuring for all of us freedom from religion. And like the dead man that keeps washing back up on the beach, this one keeps washing back up on the shores of Lake Michigan, in the City That No Longer Works, Obama’s Chicago.   “Nuns in western suburban...

Prime Minister Stephen Harper made his most direct sales pitch yet to sell Canada's energy, vowing that "foreign money and influence" will not obstruct his government's goal to sell oil and other natural resources to countries other than just the United States. [clipped] Following up on themes he's developed ever since the the Obama administration delayed a decision on construction of the Keystone pipeline that would take bitumen from the Alberta oilsands to refineries on the U.S. gulf coast, Harper said that decision would not prevent Canada from capitalizing on its resource wealth. "We are an emerging energy superpower," Harper...

Daydreaming during class paid off for UW-Madison student Eric Ronning. He won $11,250 on Friday at UW-Madison's annual Innovation Days for an invention he came up with during an engineering lecture. "I space out a lot," Ronning admitted, a sophomore from Lincolnwood, Ill., who is majoring in mechanical engineering. His invention, called the Manu Print, is an inexpensive prosthetic hand for amputees in developing countries. He said the prototype he created used only $20 of material. Other prosthetic hands on the market cost more than $1,000. More than $27,000 in prizes are awarded at Innovation Days, which is in its...

The Republican Party has a moral responsibility to offer alternatives to governing in Washington, U.S. Rep. Paul Ryan said Friday. Speaking to members of the Journal Sentinel editorial board, as well as reporters and editors, the Janesville Republican said that the country is in a precarious state economically and that it's not enough to just win an election. "I don't like the direction the president is taking," Ryan said. "I should criticize those. I also should offer alternatives. It's not enough to run against somebody. We have a moral responsibility to offer alternatives . . . Our country is in...

Washington - Gov. Scott Walker got a hero's reception Friday night at a banquet for conservative activists from around the country, where he declared that his defeat in a recall election this summer would be a lasting blow against political risk-taking. "Lord help us if we fail," he said. "I'm not planning on it, but if we were to fail, I think this sets aside any courageous act in American politics for at least a decade if not a generation." A featured speaker at the 39th annual Conservative Political Action Conference, Walker asked his dinner audience of roughly 1,000 to...

The coalition government has been thrown into crisis after six cabinet members quit over renewed European demands for more economic austerity. Laos four ministers - Transport Minister Makis Voridis, Alternate Defence Minister Georgios Georgiou, Deputy Shipping Minister Adonis Georgiadis and Deputy Rural Development and Food Minister Asterios Rondulis - announced their resignations after party leader Yiorgos Karatzaferis said he would vote against the new austerity measures, that cuts deep into the minimum wage and other private sector pay. Deputy Foreign Minister Mariliza Xenoyiannakopoulou, a Pasok MP, also resigned her post on Friday. "They are trying to impose measures that will...

Former Enron adviser Paul Krugman has expanded the blog post we criticized Wednesday into a full-length column, and in doing so made explicit a predictable fallacy in his thinking. To review, Krugman's argument is that the sharp decline in marriage rates among less-affluent white Americans, documented by Charles Murray in his new book, "Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010," is "mainly about money" as opposed to "morals." Here's the meat of Krugman's argument: "When you see a modest rise in incomes for the lower tiers of the income distribution, you have to realize that all--yes, all--of this rise...

Greece's plans to avert bankruptcy were in chaos on Friday night as politicians, police and protesters formed a powerful and violent opposition to the internationally-imposed austerity measures. Lucas Papademos, prime minister, struggled to maintain order in parliament ahead of Sunday's crucial vote on the budget plans which he needs to win to secure Greece's €130bn (£109bn) bail-out. Five ministers resigned in protest over the budget plans, which include tough spending and pension cuts, that were approved on Thursday by political leaders. Late on Friday night, the remaining memebers of the cabinet approved the draft bill of austerity measures which the...

SAN DIEGO -- Assembly Speaker John A. Pérez may be nowhere more popular than at a labor caucus meeting at a Democratic convention, and so it was that he received a standing ovation here this afternoon and tried out a one-liner on the crowd. "This year you've seen Mitt Romney and others talk about the fact that corporations are people," the former labor organizer said. "I won't believe corporations are people until Texas executes one of them."

Billionaire Sidney Kimmel to Donate $5.5 to Fund University of Missouri Cold Fusion Research February 11, 2012 The Columbia Daily Tribune is reporting that Sidney Kimmel, Chairman of the Board of Directors and founder of Jones Apparel Group, Inc., is donating $5.5 million through his charitable foundation to fund studies in the field of cold fusion at the University of Missouri. The purpose of the gift is to try to understand the ‘pure science’ behind the excess heat that is generated in many cold fusion/LENR experiments. Kimmel’s gift will establish the Sidney Kimmel Institute for Nuclear Renaissance, or SKINR,...

Congress is demanding drones in the air over the United States - without considering the civil liberties issues. Within the span of three days last week, the House and then the Senate passed a law - H.R. 658 - requiring the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) to speed up, within 90 days, its current licensing process for government use of drones domestically and to open the national airspace to drone aircraft for commercial and private use by October 2015. While the law requires the FAA to develop guidance on drone safety, the law says absolutely nothing about the privacy or transparency...

DETROIT— Republican presidential candidate Rick Santorum is bringing his campaign message to the Detroit Economic Club. The former Pennsylvania senator is scheduled to speak at the club's luncheon meeting next Thursday at Cobo Center in Detroit. He'll speak that evening at the Oakland County Republican Party's 2012 Lincoln Day dinner at the Suburban Collection Showplace in Novi.

The United States has long been seen as a nation in its twilight as an oil producer, facing a relentless decline that began when President Richard Nixon was in the White House. He and every president since pledged to halt the U.S. slide into greater dependence on foreign oil, but the trend seemed irreversible—until now. Forty-one years later, U.S. oil production is on the rise. U.S. oil fields yielded an estimated 5.68 million barrels per day in 2011—their highest output since 2003, thanks largely to a surge of new production from shale oil that lies beneath the Great Plains. The...

Santorum, fresh from three victories this week, will be in Coeur d'Alene and the Boise area, said Jonathan Parker, executive director of the Idaho Republican Party. Santorum will speak at 7 p.m. Tuesday at the Capital High School auditorium.

Berkshire Hathaway chairman and famous investor Warren Buffett has dismissed gold as a "valueless asset". Billionaire investor Warren Buffett has dismissed gold as a valueless asset saying that it has no inherent value. In an article for Fortune magazine, Buffett said that gold investors were pinning their hopes on future demand. He warned that gold was a self-inflating bubble, created by investors desperate for a viable alternative to property and shares. The infamous investor warned that investors in gold would be left with egg on their face when the price eventually crashed. "Bubbles blown large enough inevitably pop," he said....

TULSA, Okla.—Rick Santorum stirs his ever-growing crowds when he promises to right a country awash in "immoral debt" and to replace an administration he argues has "callousness toward life and family and faith." Of the GOP presidential hopefuls, Santorum is the most public and emphatic about his faith, drawing on his Catholicism and deeply held views on social issues as the foundation of his message. It serves to solidify his standing among religiously motivated voters -- and subtly remind them of lingering reservations of opponent Mitt Romney's spiritual background. The former Pennsylvania senator found a receptive audience Friday in Washington,...

OKLAHOMA CITY—When Rick Santorum swooped into this Super Tuesday state Thursday, interest was so high that his campaign moved an event from a gun store to a nearby hotel conference center. Later, he drew thousands to the basketball arena at Oral Roberts University in Tulsa. Mr. Santorum is carrying the buzz of an ascendant contender, following his surprise sweep of Colorado, Minnesota and Missouri in Tuesday voting. With the new voter interest has come a boost in fund-raising: Since the victories, Mr. Santorum has raised $1 million a day, his campaign said Friday. The former lawmaker has been a leading...

Republican presidential candidate Rick Santorum is headed to Washington state Monday, planning campaign stops in Olympia and Tacoma, as he fires up his campaign for the March 3 GOP caucuses. Santorum plans to meet with foes of gay marriage in Olympia in the afternoon, and then will hold a campaign rally at 7 p.m. at the Washington Historical Museum in Tacoma, according to a copy of the plans distributed to state GOP officials. It is the first scheduled visit from one of the Republican presidential contenders ahead of the state caucuses, which will be a prize this year with the...

Rick Santorum's spokesman Hogan Gidley just tweeted that the candidate has raised $3 million since his clean sweep of the contests on Tuesday. As we said yesterday, fundraising begets fundraising, and right now Santorum is on a roll.

Large portions of the western half of the U.S. do not have access to 3G or faster mobile broadband service, according to a new map released by the U.S. Federal Communications Commission. The map, released by the FCC Friday, shows large parts of Alaska, Nevada, Idaho, Arizona, Texas and Montana as not having 3G or faster mobile broadband service. The map shows nearly all states have some areas uncovered by 3G service, including parts of New York and Pennsylvania and large parts of West Virginia and Maine. The areas identified in the map will be eligible for service through the...

According to a Jan. 31 Associated Press report, the notion of eliminating or dramatically reducing state income taxes is gathering steam. The AP reported that in Idaho, Kansas, Maine, Missouri, Ohio, Oklahoma and South Carolina — all but one of which elected a Republican governor in 2010 — this idea is getting a serious look. Currently, only nine states lack an income tax. Until 1991, Connecticut was income-tax-free as well. Considering what has happened in the Constitution State since then, one really can't blame those considering repeal. In '91, Gov. Lowell P. Weicker Jr. and the legislature enacted Connecticut's first...

WASHINGTON — In the final budget proposal of his term, President Obama on Monday will revive the deficit-reduction and job-creation proposals he first called for last September and forecast a $1.3 trillion deficit for this fiscal year that drops to $901 billion next year, administration officials said on Friday. The election-year budget calls for more than $350 billion in short-term spending and payroll-tax cuts to continue spurring the economy like those in the September plan, including proposals for infrastructure projects and subsidies to states to help keep teachers and first responders in their jobs, requests that Congressional Republicans have blocked...

Cardinal-designate Timothy Dolan WASHINGTON, February 10, 2012 (LifeSiteNews.com) - Responses from Catholic leaders ranged from concerned to outraged following the Obama administration’s latest rewording of the birth control mandate in an effort to stem criticism over its impact on religious freedom. U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops president Timothy Dolan gave a cautious response in a statement Friday, saying that the conference “sees initial opportunities� in preserving religious freedom after the announcement, but “continues to express concerns.� “Today’s decision to revise how individuals obtain services that are morally objectionable to religious entities and people of faith is a first step in...

(Reuters) - U.S. health insurers said on Friday they feared President Barack Obama had set a new precedent by making them responsible for providing free birth control to employees of religious groups as he sought to defuse an election-year landmine. "We are concerned about the precedent this proposed rule would set," said Robert Zirkelbach, spokesman for America's Health Insurance Plans, the industry's trade group. "As we learn more about how this rule would be operationalized, we will provide comments through the regulatory process." Zirkelbach said insurers "have long offered contraceptive coverage to employers as part of comprehensive, preventive benefits that...

(CNSNews.com) – House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) said Thursday that President Barack Obama chose to embrace so-called “super PACs” (political action committees) for his re-election campaign so that billionaire philanthropists Charles H. Koch and David G. Koch would not “decide who the next President would be.” “The president made a decision, which I think was a wise one, that he was not going to unilaterally disarm and leave the field to the Koch brothers to decide who will be president of the United States and would control the Congress, and his commitment was for full disclosure,” Pelosi said. The...

(CNSNews.com) – Texas Gov. Rick Perry (R), referencing the ‘Halftime in America’ Super Bowl ad, said that he was “fearful of what the final score is going to be,” if President Barack Obama is reelected in November. “If it’s halftime in America, I’m fearful of what the final score is going to be if we let this president start the second half as the quarterback,” Perry said in a speech to the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) on Thursday in Washington, D.C. Perry’s remark was a reference to a Chrysler ad aired during the Super Bowl that featured Clint Eastwood...

Spain's new conservative government has passed a range of sweeping labour reforms it hopes will "mark a before and after" in a country that has the highest jobless rate in the developed world. The reforms, which were officially unveiled on Friday, include cutting the maximum severance pay that employees can receive to 33 days salary per year of service, down from 45 days. Companies in hardship will also be able to opt out of collective bargaining agreements reached with unions, and have greater flexibility to adjust working conditions such as schedules, workplace tasks and wages depending on how the economy...

The Obama administration is attempting to persuade U.S. corporations about the benefits of investing in renewable energy in an effort to help the industry after a government grant program expired. The Department of Energy-led effort includes a planned March 13 meeting at which senior financial-firm executives and Energy Secretary Steven Chu would speak. The 79 invitees include some of the largest corporations in the U.S., from Exxon Mobil Corp. to Walt Disney. The idea is to tell companies with big tax bills about the "attractive rates of return and brand benefits" that come with entering the so-called tax equity markets...

More than a day after the announcement of a mammoth national mortgage servicing settlement, the actual terms of the deal still aren't public. The website created for the national settlement lists the document as "coming soon."

Washington — An independent audit of the federal loan guarantee initiatives that backed the troubled solar technology company Solyndra failed to turn up the waste and broad incompetence that critics assert riddled the programs. But the audit showed the laws passed from 2005 to 2009 that established the programs in question at the Energy Department had few provisions for thorough monitoring and oversight of the loan guarantees once they were approved. One program created in 2007 did not “provide any requirements regarding governance and monitoring of loans after closing.” “Neither the statutes nor the regulations governing the programs specify internal...

Greece's future in the euro grew increasingly precarious Friday as violence erupted on the streets of Athens during a general strike and five politicians resigned from the government after European leaders demanded deeper spending cuts. Hours after Greece claimed it had reached an agreement among its squabbling party leaders on new cutbacks, European officials dashed any hopes that the country was close to getting its bailout. Finance ministers said more austerity needs to be agreed and set a deadline for the middle of next week. "They are trying to impose measures that will make the recession worse and drive the...

Catholic League president Bill Donohue comments on President Obama’s revised healthcare plan as it affects Catholic institutions:President Obama’s latest ploy just adds insult to injury. If the insurance plan of a Catholic institution must cover services it deems immoral, then such a healthcare plan is offensive, plain and simple.The Catholic League, for example, uses Christian Brothers as its insurance carrier. So if a future employee of ours were to demand free abortion-inducing drugs, and she is allowed to request free drugs from Christian Brothers, then the rest of us would, in effect, be subsidizing her abortion. This is outrageous and...

Lucas Papademos, the Greek premier, faced pressure to reshuffle his cabinet on Friday after five ministers and undersecretaries resigned in protest against fresh austerity measures imposed by international lenders in return for a second, €130bn bail-out. Three resignations came as the rightwing Laos (People’s) party announced that it was pulling out of his national unity government. Marilena Xenoyiannokopoulouaratzaferispademos, a senior socialist serving as European affairs minister, also stood down, saying she was opposed to labour reforms included in the package. Yannis Koutsoukos, the socialist deputy labour minister, resigned on Thursday. Ms Xenoyiannokopoulouaratzaferispademos accused Greece’s European partners of “violating” the union’s...

SAN FRANCISCO (AP) - Shoppers in San Francisco will have to pay 10 cents per bag and more retailers are now banned from handing out plastic bags under a proposal approved Tuesday by the city's Board of Supervisors. San Francisco already bans large grocery stores and chain pharmacies from using plastic bags, which are blamed for clogging landfills and waterways. The proposal extends that ban to restaurants and to gift shops, hardware stores, boutiques and other retailers.

What other plausible explanation is there for the decline from 42.4 MGD in July 2011 to 30.9 MGD in November 2011 other than a dramatic decline in discretionary driving? That 27% drop in a few months in unprecedented, except in times of war or sharp economic contraction, i.e. recession. If we stipulate that vehicles and fuel consumption are essential proxies for the U.S. economy, then we can expect a steep decline in economic activity to register in other metrics within the next few months. Such a sharp drop would of course be "unexpected" given the positive employment data of the...

It was quite an opening day at CPAC 2012, as two emerging superstars of the movement offered compelling critiques of Obamaism, and laid out a principled path -- brick by brick -- to conservative victory.  I can only hope the remaining 2012 GOP presidential candidates were taking copious notes.  We reviewed Sen. Marco Rubio's powerful message yesterday afternoon; not to be outdone, Rep. Paul Ryan articulated his vision for "opportunity, prosperity, and growth," versus the president's road to "debt, doubt, and decline" at last night's banquet.  A few choice excerpts, via Ryan's Prosperity PAC:   It will not be enough...

If not the religious institutions….or the women….who pays for the contraceptive services? The Obama administration claims it pays for itself, pointing to this new report: http://aspe.hhs.gov/health/reports/2012/contraceptives/ib.shtml “While the costs of contraceptives for individual women can be substantial and can influence choice of contraceptive methods, available data indicate that providing contraceptive coverage as part of a health insurance benefit does not add to the cost of providing insurance coverage. Evidence from well-documented prior expansions of contraceptive coverage indicates that the cost to issuers ... is zero.” We shall see what the insurance companies say…

(Reuters) - Americans felt worse about their personal finances in early February, even as they saw a light at the end of the tunnel for the jobs market, a survey released on Friday showed. An improving financial situation was reported by just 23 percent of all consumers surveyed in early February, down from 29 percent in January and last year's 30 percent. One in four families reported declines in income in the early February survey, even as official data have shown overall U.S. income growing since last August, albeit at a slow pace. The Thomson Reuters/University of Michigan overall index...

Professor Ian Clark just does not see any evidence of oil sands contributing to global warming. That’s quite a stand to take in the face of a global environmental community that considers the development of the Canadian heavy oil industry tantamount to hastening the end of the world.But Prof. Clark can claim to know a bit more about the science behind climate change than the average person. As a professor in the Department of Earth Sciences at the University of Ottawa, he focuses on paleoclimatology — the study of changes in climate taken on the scale of the entire history...