Free Republic

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.

The European Union is pushing for a more stable financial system by clamping down on “shadow banking”—the high-finance sector that handles trillions of dollars but isn’t bound by the same rules as banks. The Commission, the EU’s executive arm, said Wednesday that while investment vehicles such as money market funds or hedge funds are welcome because they provide extra sources of financing for companies and the economy, they can also pose serious threats to long-term financial stability. Analysts and economists have argued that the lack of oversight in the shadow banking sector played a major role in the global financial...

It should be clear that among the causes of the recent financial crisis was an unjustified faith in rational expectations, market efficiencies, and the techniques of modern finance. That faith was stoked in part by the huge financial rewards that enabled the extremes of borrowing, the economic imbalances, and the pretenses and assurances of the credit-rating agencies to persist so long. A relaxed approach by regulators and legislators reflected the new financial zeitgeist. All the seeming mathematical precision that was brought to investment, all the complicated new products, including the explosion of derivatives, that were intended to diffuse and minimize...

You and I live in a totally different world than the ultra-rich and the international banking elite do. Many of them live in a world where they simply do not pay income taxes. Today, it is estimated that a third of all the wealth in the world is held in offshore banks. So why is so much of the wealth of the globe located in places such as Monaco, the Cayman Islands, Bermuda, the Bahamas, and the Isle of Man? It isn't because those are fun places to visit. It is to avoid taxes. The super wealthy and the international...