ALWAYS CONSULT YOUR INVESTMENT PROFESSIONAL BEFORE MAKING ANY INVESTMENT DECISION
April 7, 2024 | By the Dawn’s Early Light: On the Fall of the Francis Scott Key Bridge
The Baltimore bridge that collapsed on March 26th was named for Francis Scott Key, who wrote the lyrics to the American national anthem “The Star-Spangled Banner” in 1814. His inspiration was the British bombardment of Fort McHenry in the critical port of Baltimore during the War of 1812. The British had just burned the U.S. Capitol and the […]
March 8, 2024 | The Public Bank That Wasn’t: New Jersey’s Excursion into Public Banking
In 2017, Phil Murphy, a former Goldman Sachs executive, made the establishment of a public, state-owned bank a centerpiece issue during his run for New Jersey governor. He regularly championed public banking in speeches, town halls and campaign commercials. He won the race, and the nation’s second state-owned bank following the stellar model of the Bank […]
February 15, 2024 | Defusing the Derivatives Time Bomb: Some Proposed Solutions
This is a sequel to a Jan. 15 article titled “Casino Capitalism and the Derivatives Market: Time for Another ‘Lehman Moment’?”, discussing the threat of a 2024 “black swan” event that could pop the derivatives bubble. That bubble is now over ten times the GDP of the world and is so interconnected and fragile that […]
January 16, 2024 | Casino Capitalism and the Derivatives Market: Time for Another ‘Lehman Moment’?
Reading the tea leaves for the 2024 economy is challenging. On January 5th, Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen said we have achieved a “soft landing,” with wages rising faster than prices in 2023. But critics are questioning the official figures, and prices are still high. Surveys show that consumers remain apprehensive. There are other concerns. On […]
October 3, 2023 | “The Great Taking”: How They Can Own It All
’You’ll own nothing and be happy’? David Webb has gone through the 50-year history of all the legal constructs that have been put in place to technically enable that to happen.” [Oct 2 interview titled “The Great Taking: Who Really Owns Your Assets?”] The derivatives bubble has been estimated to exceed one quadrillion dollars (a quadrillion is […]
August 31, 2023 | More Banks to Fail? Not in North Dakota
US. banks are again in the crosshairs. Standard and Poor’s has downgraded five new middle-tier banks and put three others on negative outlook. This follows sweeping downgrades earlier in August by Moody’s, which cut credit ratings on 10 banks and placed four of the 15 largest U.S. banks on review for possible downgrade. As with the banks going […]
August 9, 2023 | Ellen Brown: War By Other Means: Short Selling JPMorgan Chase
When the FDIC put Silicon Valley Bank (SVB) and Signature Bank into receivership in March, a study reported on the Social Science Research Network found that nearly 200 midsized U.S. banks were similarly vulnerable to bank runs. First Republic Bank went into receivership in May, but the feared contagion of runs did not otherwise occur. […]
July 12, 2023 | Ellen Brown: The Federal Debt Trap: Issues and Possible Solutions
Rather than collecting taxes from the wealthy,” wrote the New York Times Editorial Board in a July 7 opinion piece, “the government is paying the wealthy to borrow their money.” Titled “America Is Living on Borrowed Money,” the editorial observes that over the next decade, according to the Congressional Budget Office (CBO), annual federal budget […]
June 4, 2023 | Another Look at the Financial Transactions Tax That Could Eliminate Need for All Others
A small financial transactions tax could correct a number of maladies in our economic system, from the federal debt crisis to the widening wealth divide to the rampant financialization of the economy, while eliminating taxes on income and sales. The debt ceiling crisis has again brought into focus the perennial gap between what the government […]
May 17, 2023 | Squeezed by the Shorts: Time to Ban Short Selling?
Short sellers have made a killing in the recent banking crisis, scalping $14.3 billion from bank stock owners just in March of this year. Short sellers “borrow” stock they don’t own and immediately sell it, driving the price down. Then they buy it back at the lower price, return the stock, and pocket the difference. Bankers […]
April 28, 2023 | How the War on Crypto Triggered a Banking Crisis
According to an article in American Banker titled “SEC’s Gensler Directly Links Crypto and Bank Failures,” SEC Chair Gary Gensler has asked for more financial resources to police the crypto market. Gensler testified at an April 18 House Financial Services Committee hearing: [Crypto companies] have chosen to be noncompliant and not provide investors with confidence and […]
April 12, 2023 | The Cobalt Gold Rush and the East Palestine Disaster
Holidays in my childhood were spent at my grandparents’ farm in Plain Grove, Pennsylvania, 35 miles from East Palestine, Ohio. My grandfather’s grandfather fought at Gettysburg and homesteaded the 160-acre farm after the Civil War. My grandmother sold it in the 1960s for $13,000, lacking a male heir to do the work; but my relatives […]
February 23, 2023 | What Will Happen When Banks Go Bust? Bank Runs, Bail-Ins and Systemic Risk
Financial podcasts have been featuring ominous headlines lately along the lines of “Your Bank Can Legally Seize Your Money” and “Banks Can STEAL Your Money?! Here’s How!” The reference is to “bail-ins:” the provision under the 2010 Dodd-Frank Act allowing Systemically Important Financial Institutions (SIFIs, basically the biggest banks) to bail in or expropriate their […]
January 18, 2023 | Solving the Debt Crisis the American Way
On Friday, Jan. 13, Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen wrote to Congress that the U.S. government will hit its borrowing limit on Jan. 19, forcing the new Congress into negotiations over the debt limit much sooner than expected. She said she will use accounting maneuvers she called “extraordinary measures” to keep U.S. finances running for a few months, […]
September 1, 2022 | How to Green Our Parched Farmlands and Finance Critical Infrastructure
Congress has passed two major infrastructure bills in the last year, but imminent needs in infrastructure funding remain. The 2021 Bipartisan Infrastructure Law chiefly focused on conventional highway programs, and the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022 (IRA) mainly centered on energy security and combating climate change. According to the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE), […]
July 27, 2022 | Interest Rate Hikes Will Not Save Us from Inflation
Rather than making money harder to get, the U.S. government needs to focus on the other side of the demand vs. supply equation. In prescribing cures for inflation, economists rely on the diagnosis of Nobel laureate Milton Friedman: inflation is always and everywhere a monetary phenomenon—too much money chasing too few goods. But that equation […]
July 8, 2022 | Achieving Self-Funding Local Sovereignty as Global Food Systems Collapse
Deglobalizing” and “dedollarizing” have been much in the news. Reducing dependence on the global supply chain and the U.S. dollar are trends that are happening not just internationally but locally. In the United States, we have seen movements both for local food independence and to divest from Wall Street banks. The burgeoning cryptocurrency movement is […]
June 8, 2022 | The Food Shortage Solution in Your Own Backyard
A confluence of crises—lockdowns and business closures, mandates and worker shortages, supply chain disruptions and inflation, sanctions and war—have compounded to trigger food shortages; and we have been warned that they may last longer than the food stored in our pantries. What to do? Jim Gale, founder of Food Forest Abundance, pointed out in a […]
May 17, 2022 | Ellen Brown: Only a People’s Monetary Reset Can Prevent a Feudalistic Technocracy
This is part two to a May 4, 2022 article called “A Monetary Reset Where the Rich Don’t Own Everything,” the gist of which was that national and global debt levels are unsustainably high. We need a “reset,” but of what sort? The “Great Reset” of the World Economic Forum (WEF) would leave the people […]
May 9, 2022 | A Monetary Reset Where the Rich Don’t Own Everything
We have a serious debt problem, but solutions such as the World Economic Forum’s “Great Reset” are not the future we want. It’s time to think outside the box for some new solutions. In ancient Mesopotamia, it was called a Jubilee. When debts at interest grew too high to be repaid, the slate was wiped […]
May 3, 2022 | The Coming Global Financial Revolution: Russia Is Following the American Playbook
No country has successfully challenged the U.S. dollar’s global hegemony—until now. How did this happen and what will it mean? Foreign critics have long chafed at the “exorbitant privilege” of the U.S. dollar as global reserve currency. The U.S. can issue this currency backed by nothing but the “full faith and credit of the United […]
February 10, 2022 | Rather Than Sink Main Street by Raising Interest Rates, the Fed Could Save It. Here’s How.
Inflation is plaguing consumer markets, putting pressure on the Federal Reserve to raise interest rates to tighten the money supply. But as Rex Nutting writes in a MarketWatch column titled “Why Interest Rates Aren’t Really the Right Tool to Control Inflation”: It may be heresy to those who think the Fed is all-powerful, but the […]
December 31, 2021 | The Real Antidote to Inflation: Stoking the Fire Without Burning Down the Barn
The Fed has options for countering the record inflation the U.S. is facing that are more productive and less risky than raising interest rates. The Federal Reserve is caught between a rock and a hard place. Inflation grew by 6.8% in November, the fastest in 40 years, a trend the Fed has now acknowledged is not […]
November 4, 2021 | Wall Street’s Latest Scheme Is Monetizing Nature Itself
A month before the 2021 United Nations Climate Change Conference (known as COP26) kicked off in Scotland, a new asset class was launched by the New York Stock Exchange that will “open up a new feeding ground for predatory Wall Street banks and financial institutions that will allow them to dominate not just the human […]
September 30, 2021 | A New Water Source That Could Make Drought a Thing of the Past
Lack of fresh water is now a global crisis. Water shortages mean food shortages, with hunger creating death tolls substantially exceeding those of the current Covid-19 crisis. According to the United Nations, some 800 million people are without clean water, and 40% of the world’s population is impacted by drought. By one measure, almost 100 […]