America

I’m a long time member of the Strong Towns organization which advocates for financially solvent municipal governance. I’m also a member of the Congress for New Urbanism which strives to build walkable mixed-use neighborhoods of the kind our great grandparents would have taken for granted, but are rare indeed these days. I often ask myself what good a financially stable town is if most of the people living there are heavily leveraged and living pay check to pay check. So I have a particular fascination with people who embody the Strong Towns ethos within their own households.

"Intervention in foreign exchange markets in order to gain a competitive advantage is unacceptable," proclaims US Treasury Secretary Jack Lew in a strongly worded statement today with regard America's position in the global economy. That we note this comment is only relevant as, despite the apparent "stability" of the Chinese Yuan against the USD, relative to the 13-currency-basket with which China primarily trades, the Yuan has collapsed to 17-month lows - with JPY and EUR appearing to bear the brunt of the pain.

Submitted by John Whitehead via The Rutherford Institute,

“The Founding Fathers never intended a nation where citizens would pay nearly half of everything they earn to the government.” ? Ron Paul

If there is an absolute maxim by which the federal government seems to operate, it is that the American taxpayer always gets ripped off.

With every passing day, the Fed is slowly but surely losing the game.

Only it is not just former (and in some cases current) Fed presidents admitting central banks are increasingly powerless to boost the global economy, even if they still have sway over capital markets. What is far more insidious to the Fed's waning credibility is when former economists affiliated with the Fed start repeating mantras that until recently were only a prominent feature in the so-called fringe media.

Via Michael Snyder's Economic Collapse blog,

The systematic destruction of the American way of life is happening all around us, and yet most people have no idea what is happening. 

Once upon a time in America, if you were responsible and hard working you could get a good paying job that could support a middle class lifestyle for an entire family even if you only had a high school education.  Things weren’t perfect, but generally almost everyone in the entire country was able to take care of themselves without government assistance.