Business

Via George Friedman and Jacob Shapiro of MauldinEconomics.com,

While politicians are more than willing to rattle their economic sabres at China, we suspect, after China flaunted a range of high-tech weaponry at the International Defense Exhibition and Conference in Dubai, we suspect Washington will slow its roll a little with any kinetic warmongery...

Let's start with lasers, says Popular Science's Jeffrey Lin and P.W.Singer...

A few years ago, you were laughed at for calling the stock market a bubble. Now everyone, even the financial mainstream media is calling it a bubble and continuing to openly promote it. A few years ago, you were laughed at for saying that the monetary policy experiments that the Fed and every other central bank embarked on would be a failure, and would not lead to any growth and only reinflate the previous Fed induced asset bubbles. Even former Dallas Fed President Richard Fisher called QE "a massive gift for the rich" because they are the only ones to have benefited from it.

Via C.Jay Engel of The Mises Institute,

The story is that it is consumers that are going "to push the economy to grow more than 2 percent this year." That's Dallas Fed President Robert Kaplan's recently expressed view. It's the old fallacy of spending — rather than saving — our way into growth.

It's remarkable that no one talks about the fact that the economy since 2008 was built on little but cheap debt, and therefore depends on the continued flow of such debt.

Having warned that "everything will grind to a halt on March 5th" due to the under-appreciated debt-ceiling debacle that looms over Washington, and exclaiming that "what is going on today is complete insanity," former Reagan Budget Director David Stockman is rapidly losing faith that anything can be done... 

"I've thrown in the towel because he’s not paying attention and he’s not learning anything and he’s making ridiculous statements."