With debt ceilings, spending plans, and tax reforms focusing all eyes on Washington, we thought it notable that for the first time in US history, the cost of interest on US government debt has risen above half a trillion dollars...
Source: @NorthmanTrader
One wonders, given the grandiose spending plans, if we will ever get back below half a trillion dollars?
Authored by Gordon Long via MATASII.com,
Many today strongly believe it is morally wrong to indenture students to the degree of liabilities presently required to achieve the education required to become a productive contributor within our modern society.
The question we need to demand answers to is why has college costs for students exploded upward, while salaries and job positions for graduates has not? What is driving the relentless and inexplicable surge in the debt burden for students and their parents?
The grocery business in the U.S. is, and always has been, a fairly miserable one. In fact, from A&P to Grand Union, Dahl's, etc., bankruptcy courts have been littered with the industry's failures for decades.
Of course the reasoning is fairly simple...razor-thin operating margins that hover around 1-3% leave the entire industry completely incapable of absorbing even the slightest financial shock from things like increasing competition or food deflation.
That didn't last long.
Just one week after Canada's largest alt-mortgage lender Home Capital Group sent shockwaves across the Canadian financial system, when it confirmed that long-running allegations about its liar-loan business were true, and suffered a spectacular bank run necessitating emergency loans which yield a stunning 22.5%, the company is now "actively seeking expanded sources of funding" having drawn half of its C$2b rescue loan, according to an email sent to mortgage brokers seen by Bloomberg News.
Authored by Charles Hugh-Smith via OfTwoMinds blog,
Debt is serfdom, capital in all its forms is freedom.
If we accept that our financial system is nothing but a wealth-transfer mechanism from the productive elements of our economy to parasitic, neofeudal rentier-cartels and self-serving state fiefdoms, that raises a question: what do we do about it?