Free Republic

(summary deck only) Silver futures contracts fall $3.19, or 7.5%, to $39.38 an ounce, their third consecutive decrease since hitting a record $48.58 on Friday. Most other commodities also retreat.

At Tea Party rallies and at other get-togethers over the last two years, one could often see placards reading "End the Fed." That also happens to be the title of a worthy book by Rep. Ron Paul. If one googles those three words within quotation marks, one should get nigh on a million hits. One might conclude that there's a movement afoot in America to abolish our central bank, the Federal Reserve. Why are folks getting so exercised about this secretive quasi-governmental agency? One reason folks are riled at the Fed is that the Fed sets interest rates, and rates...

http://www.zerohedge.com/article/marc-faber-death-fiat-money-dollar-will-go-value-exactly-zero

The Fed Is Out of Ammunition A discredited dollar is a likely outcome of the current crisis. By CHRISTOPHER WOOD With an estimated $4 trillion in housing wealth and $9 trillion in stock-market wealth destroyed so far in the United States, there is little doubt that we are witnessing a classic debt-deflation bust at work, characterized by falling prices, frozen credit markets and plummeting asset values. Those who want to understand the mechanism might ponder Irving Fisher's comment in 1933: When it comes to booms gone bust, "over-investment and over-speculation are often important; but they would have far less serious...

Our US currency used to be coins of silver and gold. We then began issuing gold and silver certificates, that were less risky (and heavy) than carrying silver and gold around, but they could be redeemed for their value in gold and silver. These certificates or notes, had value that was based in a tangible, physical asset. Today being off the gold standard for over 30+ years, we have federal reserve notes that do not have value based in anything phyically tangible. They have 'value' because it is now based in the 'confidence' people have in the US dollar. Whatever...

Barack Obama's tax advisers recently posted a piece in the Wall Street Journal about their candidate's tax plans. Their article was designed to triangulate, painting their candidate as a tax cutter and the Republican opposition as a secret tax raiser. It was well written and well argued — not that you can really trust anything you read about what candidates will or will not do once in office. In any case, I was discussing the piece with a person whose politics are certainly left of center. She said to me something along the following lines: I'm really not sure I...

( Long but important read. Those with a 30 second sound bite capacity should simply move on. Nothing to see here.) * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *The most powerful of the latter-day pagan gods that have guided the destinies of humanity for the past two-score years is irredeemable debt. Before August 14, 1971, debts were obligations, and the word "bond" was to mean literally what it said: the opposite of freedom. The privilege of issuing debt had a countervailing responsibility: that of repayment. On...

As if Ron Paul's supporters needed any more motivation to storm the battlements and wreak havoc on the Republican presidential primary, now comes this: the feds are trying to take away their money. Federal agents on Wednesday raided the Evansville, Indiana headquarters of the National Organization for the Repeal of the Federal Reserve and Internal Revenue Codes (NORFED), an organization of "sound money" advocates that for the past decade has been selling what it calls Liberty Dollars, a private currency it says is backed by silver and gold stored in Idaho, with a total of more than $20 million in...

The ardent supporters of Rep. Ron Paul, the iconoclastic Texas libertarian whose campaign for the presidency is threatening to upend the battle for the Republican nomination, got word yesterday of a new source of outrage and motivation: reports of a federal raid on a company that was selling thousands of coins marked with the craggy visage of their hero. Federal agents on Thursday raided the Evansville, Ind., headquarters of the National Organization for the Repeal of the Federal Reserve Act and Internal Revenue Code (Norfed), an organization of "sound money" advocates that for the past decade has been selling a...

The Ministry of Culture has begun insisting that tourists visiting the country’s monuments, including the Taj Mahal, pay the entrance fees in rupees rather than in dollars. Entrance to many sites for foreign tourists is priced in dollars and then converted to rupees, but the ministry has been losing tourism revenue as the dollar slid more than 12 percent this year against the rupee. The government had fixed a $5 entrance fee for World Heritage sites like the Taj Mahal and Humayun’s Tomb and $2 for other monuments at a time when the dollar was worth about 50 rupees. It...

Panama Has No Central Bank By David Saied Posted on 4/26/2007 In this modern, post-–Bretton Woods world of "monetary order" and coordinated central-bank inflation, many who are otherwise sympathetic to the arguments against central banks believe that the elimination of central banking is an unattainable, utopian dream. For a real-world example of how a system of market-chosen monetary policy would work in the absence of a central bank, one need not look to the past; the example exists in present-day Central America, in the Republic of Panama, a country that has lived without a central bank since its independence, with...

Can someone tell me why so many are excited about the Dow hitting 13,000? In suppose it's better than having it hit "0" but, given the decades long destruction of the value of U.S. "money," the thing SHOULD be up over 50,000 or more. For anyone who shives a git, here's why I say that. (I wrote this a number of years ago when things were NOT going well with the economy. Trust me: They WILL get ugly once again as man -- or certain men -- cannot resist playing God. We continue to violate the universal, immutable laws of...

Until 1933, the U. S. dollar was the among the strongest and most stable currencies in the world. With the stroke of a pen, President Franklin Roosevelt torpedoed it. We are still plagued with the resulting inflation. All governments lust for taxpayers’ money. The ability to direct the expenditure of large sums of money confers great power upon political leaders. But the spending requirements that President Franklin Roosevelt had in mind upon taking office in 1933 were of extraordinary dimensions. Inflating the currency, in socialist theory, was a way to create more money for that end. In the 1920s, after...

The cost of war is enormously detrimental; it significantly contributes to the economic instability of the nation by boosting spending, deficits, and inflation. ....snip... Economic strength and military power contribute to the trust in a currency; in today’s world trust in the U.S. dollar is not earned and therefore fragile. ....snip... False trust placed in the dollar once was helpful to us, but panic and rejection of the dollar will develop into a real financial crisis. ....snip....

The late Nobel Economic laureate Milton Friedman once remarked, “Money is too important to be left to central bankers. You essentially have a group of unelected people who have enormous power to affect the economy. I’ve always been in favor of replacing the Fed with a laptop computer, to calculate the monetary base and expand it annually, through war, peace, feast and famine by, perhaps, a predictable 2 percent,” Friedman said.

Money is a crucial command post of any economy, and therefore of any society. Society rests upon a network of voluntary exchanges, also known as the "free-market economy"; these exchanges imply a division of labor in society, in which producers of eggs, nails, horses, lumber, and immaterial services such as teaching, medical care, and concerts, exchange their goods for the goods of others. At each step of the way, every participant in exchange benefits immeasurably, for if everyone were forced to be self-sufficient, those few who managed to survive would be reduced to a pitiful standard of living. Direct exchange...

St Petersburg, Florida - Slowly crawling out from the cozy darkness beneath my desk where I have been cowering all morning, I peer tentatively at Total Fed Credit, which I do because that is where the proverbial "money out of thin air" initially comes from. I note with alarm bells clanging so loudly that my own screaming in fear is partially drowned out, that this particular cancer ballooned by a hefty $6.6 billion last week. The reason for this continual creation of new money is perhaps best explained by Sean Corrigan himself, when he says "US commercial banks, foreign monetary...

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Currently F.D.R. is beating Reagan 74% to 26% regarding CNN.com's new poll: "Whose image should be on the dime?" F.D.R. is the anthithesis of all we stand for, and his New Deal has been a Raw Deal. Monticello's apparently going to be shed from the back of the nickel, and isn't it time that Mr. Tax-cuts Reagan replaced the Donkeys' favorite socialist president?

In an article entitled "Gold and Economic Freedom," Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan wrote that "The excess credit which the Fed pumped into the economy spilled over into the stock market- triggering a fantastic speculative boom...The speculative imbalances had become overwhelming and unmanageable by the Fed... In the absence of the gold standard, there is no way to protect savings from confiscation through inflation." The irony is that Mr. Greenspan's words, written in 1966 to describe the era leading up to the Great Depression, could easily have been written in 2003 to describe the consequences of his own Fed policies...