Franklin

Submitted by David Stockman via Contra Corner blog,

Larry Summers is a pretentious Keynesian fool, but I refer to him as the Great Thinker’s Vicar on Earth for a reason. To wit, every time the latest experiment in Keynesian intervention fails - as 84 months of ZIRP and massive QE clearly have - he can be counted on to trot out a new angle on why still another interventionist experiment or state sponsored financial fraud is just the ticket.

Originally posted Op-Ed via The Wall Street Journal,

These are strange monetary times, with negative interest rates and central bankers deemed to be masters of the universe. So maybe we shouldn’t be surprised that politicians and central bankers are now waging a war on cash. That’s right, policy makers in Europe and the U.S. want to make it harder for the hoi polloi to hold actual currency.

A Nobel prize winning economist, former chief economist and senior vice president of the World Bank, and chairman of the President’s council of economic advisers (Joseph Stiglitz) says that the International Monetary Fund and World Bank loan money to third world countries as a way to force them to open up their markets and resources for looting by the West.

Do central banks do something similar?

Submitted by John Whitehead via The Rutherford Institute,

“If you can’t say ‘Fuck’ you can’t say, ‘Fuck the government.’” ? Lenny Bruce

Not only has free speech become a four-letter word - profane, obscene, uncouth, not to be uttered in so-called public places - but in more and more cases, the government deems free speech to be downright dangerous and in some instances illegal.