Business

With sadly ironic timing, we noted just last week that the blowback from "unequivocally good" low oil prices was set to cross the border from an increasingly suicidal Canada, and so, as AP reports, it appears Alaska is facing the toughest of times. As oil prices make new cycle lows, Alaska Gov. Bill Walker has called for the state's first income tax in 35 years in order to close a $3.5-billion-dollar deficit the state is carrying.

Submitted by Alasdair Macleod via GoldMoney.com,

One can understand the Fed's frustration over the failure of its interest rate policy, and its desire to escape the zero bound.

Submitted by Brandon Smith via Alt-Market.com,

In my last article, I outlined the deliberately engineered trend toward the forced “harmonization” of national economies and monetary policies, as well as the ultimate end goal of globalists: a single world currency system controlled by the International Monetary Fund and, by extension, global governance, which internationalists sometimes refer to in their more honest public moments as the “new world order.”

At the peak of the craziness of the last cycle, banks took to protecting themselves by buying (credit) protection on other banks as a 'hedge' for systemic risk (which instead exacerbated contagion concerns, seemingly missing the facts that their bids drove risk wider, increaing counterparty risks, and that the inevitable collapse required to trigger these trades would also mean the payoffs to the 'hedges' would never be realized).

Submitted by Gail Tverberg via Our Finite World,