Free Republic

The piece on the current crisis that catches our eye runs on the Times op-ed page today under the headline “The Neoliberal Looting of America.” It’s by a law professor on the Coast, Mehrsa Baradaran. It’s about how, as she puts it, “the health of the finance industry and stock market are completely disconnected from the actual financial health of the American people.” By our lights, it’s a fabulous issue. Professor Baradaran lays the problem to what she calls an “ideological coup” that has “quietly transformed our society over the last 50 years, raising the fortunes of the financial economy...

The world’s largest cryptocurrency dropped to its lowest level in more than a year on Monday. Bitcoin hit a low of $4,951.47, bringing its losses to more than 21 percent in the past seven days and more than 62 percent this year, according to data from CoinDesk. The digital currency began stumbling last week after months of relative calm. Bitcoin had been trading in the $6,400 range, a break from its volatility earlier this year, for the majority of October as the rest of global markets sold off. The cryptocurrency is now down more than 30 percent since last Thanksgiving....

Since the early 90's, some of us fools have been trying - largely unsuccessfully - to educate those around us to the ongoing FRAUD of our unbacked fiat paper currency and the Rothschild family criminal enterprise that spawned and still OWNS it - and, by extension, YOU! This 7-minute video is one of the best short explanations I've seen. And if the bondage in which this evil system keeps you fails to infuriate you, perhaps the unnecessary deaths of your kids in banker arranged wars will grab your attention. (Pause...Naaahhhh!) The Founding Fathers understood this evil fiat currency system and...

The Federal Reserve gives us the freedom to buy things now that we would otherwise have to wait for.In looking at the Federal Reserve, it is important to note that this is a money system, not just a group of people sitting in a conference room controlling everything having to do with the US dollar. The Fed is a system just like the government of the US is a system. What that means is that no one controls it, and that it is much bigger than any one person or group of people could ever control. They can guide it,...

...So what is Mr. Cruz's "one big problem"? It turns out to be that he's for honest money, ideally a dollar defined in terms of gold. That is, he's got the same problem that dogged those notorious losers like, to name but a few, Geo. Washington, John Adams, Thos. Jefferson, Andrew Jackson, Grover Cleveland, Wm. McKinley, Thos. Woodrow Wilson, Franklin Roosevelt, Dwight Eisenhower, John Kennedy, and Ronald Reagan.This is a bizarre argument that puts the Huffington Post - the dispatch is by its senior political economy reporter, Zach Carter - in the company of, say, Richard Nixon. It was Nixon...

Battling for control over money, and the control of our liberty While the politicians in Washington, D.C., claim we have a revenue problem and they must increase our taxes to fix the problem, the truth is we have a spending problem that they are unwilling to address. Unconstitutional spending by the federal government runs rampant, and the professional politicians of both parties are battling for control over that money, and the control of our liberty that accompanies that spending. Both sides of the political coin defend big government, seeking more power, and spending more and more of We the People’s...

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....

Still unnoticed by a large part of the population is that we have been living through a period of relative impoverishment. Money has been squandered in welfare spending, bailing out banks or even — as in Europe — of fellow governments. But many people still do not feel the pain. However, malinvestments have destroyed an immense amount of real wealth. Government spending for welfare programs and military ventures has caused increasing public debts and deficits in the Western world. These debts will never be paid back in real terms. The welfare-warfare state is the biggest malinvestment today. It does not...

HELSINKI – Big bank depositors could take a hit under planned European Union law if a bank fails, the EU's economic affairs chief Olli Rehn said on Saturday, but noted that Cyprus's bailout model was exceptional. "Cyprus was a special case ... but the upcoming directive assumes that investor and depositor liability will be carried out in case of a bank restructuring or a wind-down," Rehn, the European Economic and Monetary Affairs Commissioner, said in a TV interview with Finland's national broadcaster YLE. "But there is a very clear hierarchy, at first the shareholders, then possibly the unprotected investments and...

President Nixon gave us our fiat dollar on August 15, 1971, when he suspended convertibility of the U.S. dollar into gold. Shortly before then, I had become the proud owner of a shiny new Fiat 124 sedan. Unfortunately for the nation and the world, Nixon’s fiat proved to be as unreliable as my Fiat. Worse, while my Fiat 124 quickly returned to the iron oxide from whence it came, Nixon’s fiat dollar is still with us. Forty-one years later, Fiats have become reasonably reliable (Consumer Reports rates the 2012 Fiat 500 as “Average”), but America’s fiat dollar is still breaking...

Government officials say the banking regulator will soon publish a plan to boost incentives for consumers to park their household wealth inside the financial system. Banking executives said they are considering new interest-yielding gold-deposit accounts that would allow savers to withdraw gold bars from specially designed automated teller machines. The moves come after the central bank in November announced that lenders could hold up to 10% of their local-currency reserves in gold, in part to tempt Turkey's gold hoarders to deposit their jewelry, coins or bullion at banks.

I finally got a chance to sit down with Chris Martenson. I've been reading his ChrisMaternsonReport for some time now. For years he's been saying the US was going to get into some sort of credit crisis, and "Da Boyz" were going to try and print our way out of it. Chris and I agree, we are all witnessing a debt super cycle that's in the process of coming to its conclusion. We are living in the tail end of a 40 year global credit bubble. For the past four decades, the entire world has been growing credit/debt faster than...

Ian Farrar was fortunate to connect with legendary investor Jim Sinclair. Sinclair has been one of the acknowledged masters of precious metals investing. And he should be, he's been doing it for many decades now. In 2001, he predicted that gold would hit $1650 per ounce by January 11, 2011. He was only a few months off, a pretty amazing call made so many years ago. What did Jim Sinclair know that the rest of us didn't? He understood what governments do in times of trouble, and he understood that the greatest currency collapse in history was on the horizon....

The United States has run up a cumulative $7.5 trillion Trade Deficit. The last time the country ran a trade surplus was in 1976. Nixon closed the Gold Window in 1971. Do you believe it's just a coincidence that the rise of an un-backed Fiat Dollar and the rise of the Trade Deficit haapened so close in time? The Country has been in a pronounced economic decline since the 1970's and when the Gold Window was closed. Since then the money supply has increased many times and so has inflation. While living standards have declined, so has domestic energy production....

Andy Hoffman a/k/a Ranting Andy joins us to discuss the breakdown of fiat money, the Western Banking Cartel and perhaps Western Civilization as we know it (One of our favorite topics). While Andy doesn’t think it will go that far, he does believe that you need to be prepared by having your wealth in items that not even and elite banker or reckless politician can debase. And you can guess what that means, precious metals, gold and silver, the only money that doesn’t represent someone else’s debt. Andy is marketing director of Miles Franklin (www.MilesFranklin.com) a long established reputable bullion...

We are all familiar with this present financial crisis which began in 2008. Most people have heard that this event is “unprecedented” except for the Great Depression of the 1930s. This is largely nonsense. .... Today is just a variation on the same old theme—played particularly loudly. Here are the true stories of how freedom in money and banking were lost in America.

Research that shows that the modern explosion of US debt can, as plain as day, be attributed to fiat money. No-risk borrowing, backed by fiat money, allows politicians to spend without taxing. If not able to borrow so liberally such that they had to actually pay for things, the govt would be much more efficient, including in the wars after 9/11.

Every day is a good day to buy gold of late. It's an intoxicating state of affairs for those of us who already own the barbaric metal, which is exactly the problem. Being inordinately giddy over an investment, what Tony Montana called "getting high on your own supply", generally ends quite poorly. The question isn't so much whether or not gold has worked. It has. The question is if it's too late to enter or if this is a prudent time to take some profits. With the fundamentals widely understood, Breakout turned to technical analyst Peter Lee of UBS to...

Has anyone seen the recent showing of Andrew Jackson on History International? The part of the program that intrigued my the most was the war between Andrew Jackson and the Bank of the United States which was the prescurser to the Federal Reserve Bank of today. Jackson and Nicholas Biddle had a real gladitorial combat over the existence of the bank. Jackson was totally against the bank, he thought it would too much power to the bankers, he believed that the bank was corrupt and unconstitutional. When the the bank's charter was up for a vote in 1836, Henry Clay...

VIDEO: A brief (six minutes) history of money and monetary policy in the United States, from "real money" to "worthless fiat federal reserve notes", by Judge Andrew Napolitano of FOX Business...