Posts Tagged ‘Obama’
Zimbabwe Ben Bernanke’s “green shoots” fallacy
Posted by Benjamin J. Thompson | Filed under Economics, Essays, Liberty, News
Just focusing on the movements of a graph really doesn't help you see the big picture.
If there’s one thing I’ve learned from watching the financial markets for the last five years, it’s that eight weeks is nowhere near long enough to pronounce a conclusive change in the winds. Relying solely on post-hoc technical analysis of a graph is a sure-fire way to get yourself pantsed by the market.
When guys like Peter Schiff were foretelling the implosion of the housing market, it took over a year and a half for their predictions to manifest. Shiff, Ron Paul, Lew Rockwell, Tom Woods, and the rest of the scholars at the Ludwig von Mises Institute were right on the money, not because they were good at analyzing graphs, but because they understood immutable economic laws.
Yet during all that time, it was exactly Bernanke, Paulson, Krugman and the ones with the biggest megaphones on the mainstream news who said all was well, and the doomsayers were off their rockers. Now those people expect us to believe them when they say 8 weeks of non-carnage is an economic turnaround? There’s been no fundamental change!
An eight-week-long upturn in … stock markets since March 10th has sparked a wave of optimistic commentaries in the financial media…
It’s largely the new “mark-to-make-believe” fraudulent accounting rules that’ve permitted the banks’ financials to look so good — or at least look not so bad.
We need to keep in mind that the Fed and the government have been stirring the pot of economic chaos even more aggressively than we previously thought, and we have yet to see all the unintended consequences.
Just because the Wall Street numbers turn up for a couple of months doesn’t mean the general economy is out of the woods yet. The Great Depression lasted for about 15 years, and since our government’s chasing the same Hooverian/Rooseveltian policies so far, we should expect the same until they decide to do an about-face on their policies.
It’s not that I don’t want to see the economy recover, or that I dislike Obama so much I don’t want to see his policies bring about a recovery. This is a matter of economic laws that governments can’t suppress. Their policies have been aimed at all the symptoms but never the underlying problem. They’ve shot us up with enough pain killers to make it feel OK, but the bones are still broken. Any real recovery will be in spite of these policies. Once this bear-market rally runs its course, these facts will become obvious, at least until they find some new free market bogeyman to blame.
Obama exaggerates gun statistics, but that’s not the real issue.
Posted by Benjamin J. Thompson | Filed under Liberty, News
It’s either ignorance or deceit, ’cause it sure as heck ain’t the truth. (Sounds like more right-left-baiting. Drugs and guns shouldn’t be a left-right issue. It’s a liberty versus tyranny issue. In a free country, you are permitted to defend yourself and nobody tackles you for sucking on burnt plant matter. In non-free countries, the story is different. Which kind of country would you like to live in?)
The real figure is around 17% [citation needed]. The real figure is unknown: the “left” wants to say 90%, which is demonstrably misleading because that figure comes from guns recovered and sent to the US for tracing, which is not all of the guns recovered. FOX wants to say 17%, and I don’t know where that number came from at all. The fact of the matter is that it could be 100% and make no difference. What people do in other countries with guns bought here does not nullify the inalienable rights of Americans.
The lion’s share of Mexican drug cartel firepower actually comes from the Mexican military. You can’t buy machine guns, grenades or grenade launchers from US gun shops, and they have almost total gun control victim disarmament in Mexico, leaving the Mexican military — the enforcement arm of Mexico’s depraved and hopelessly corrupt government — as the most plausible source for the automatic weapons, grenade launchers and thrown explosives the drug cartels are getting their hands on down there. If our government has been involved in the drug trade, how deep in this mess the Mexican government must be!
But the guns aren’t even the problem.
Spiraling drug violence has more to do with drug prohibition, and our governments know that. If the drugs weren’t prohibited, then the drug commodities wouldn’t carry such a huge premium, then there wouldn’t be so much money to be made in transporting them across borders, and it wouldn’t be worth all the risk and violence. If we just decriminalized all organic drugs in the US, there would be no impetus to import them from countries that still ban them. Organized crime would lose its cash crop, which would dry up a lot of the gang activity and create genuine agricultural opportunities. In many ghetto neighborhoods it appears to children that the only way out of poverty is to get into organized crime dealing drugs. Why prop up a legal system that allows bling-encrusted thugs to be the most prosperous people in poor neighborhoods? Decriminalizing drugs would bankrupt the ostentatious drug pimps in society and move their business to some place boring and safe, like Wal-Mart.
And Wal-Mart doesn’t use drug mules and AK-47s to stock their pharmacy shelves.