But because so many of the uses to which these borrowed funds were put turned out to be unwise or unprofitable, debt ended up growing faster than productive assets. This “malinvestment” left the country poorer than it would have been had the money never been borrowed.

As for tried-and-true business practices being supplanted by “innovations,” consider the fact that no major country balances its budget any more, while all engage in historically-unprecedented deficit spending and money printing.

Shortly after his inauguration in 1933, President Franklin Roosevelt concluded that US problems were serious enough to warrant devaluation of the dollar, among other aggressive policies. Under Article I, Section 8 of the Constitution, only Congress had the power to “regulate” 6 the relationship between the dollar and gold, but FDR claimed that

Artificially-High Stock Prices Until very recently share prices, by general consensus, were set purely by market forces (though they were influenced somewhat by the Fed’s control of short term-interest rates and government tax and spending laws). Whether the market went up or down was not generally seen as a pressing policy matter for the federal

as the trend progresses, it comes to be understood that the central, underlying system that is being corrupted is the currency, that most of today’s political and financial malfeasance depends on easy money, and that inflation is an ongoing policy of this pervasive new regime. When this realization becomes sufficiently wide-spread, the trends

Ludwig von Mises, a pioneer in the Austrian School of economics, called this sudden loss of faith in a fiat currency a “crack-up boom,” and historically it has spelled the end of the currency in question.

To understand how the current system might spin out of control and where the unraveling might begin, look at where the complexity – aka systemic risk – is of late being concentrated most quickly. Post-2008, the two areas that stand out are government debt – which has been substituted for private debt as governments have borrowed unprecedented

To avoid having to repeat a disclaimer every time we mention a statistic, we’ll just say it here: Each time you see an official government number, there is an unspoken but implied assertion that it’s probably fictitious, but is being cited because even the distorted version backs up whatever point we’re making.

The national mints generally sell to wholesalers who sell to dealers who sell to individuals, which can result in a fairly high mark-up at the retail level. So while there are advantages to owning well-recognized forms of bullion like gold eagles or maple leafs (for example, they often are easier to sell), our advice is to get the most metal for