Authored by Paul Craig Roberts,

One hundred years ago European civilization, as it had been known, was ending its life in the Great War, later renamed World War I. Millions of soldiers ordered by mindless generals into the hostile arms of barbed wire and machine gun fire had left the armies stalemated in trenches. A reasonable peace could have been reached, but US President Woodrow Wilson kept the carnage going by sending fresh American soldiers to try to turn the tide against Germany in favor of the English and French.

With yet another false-dawn of crude prices blowing in the wind of cash-flow generation desperation, we thought it an appropriate time for a bigger picture glance at the state of the carnage in crude...

An ugly 2014 (down 46%)...

Brought an avalanche of knife-catching "once in a lifetime" opportunists into ETFs to buy the dip in as levered way as they could...

Only to see crude prices collapse another 31% in 2015 for the worst 2 year crash in the history of crude oil trading...

Submitted by Max Borders via The Foundation for Economic Education,

The spectacle is not a collection of images, but a social relation among people, mediated by images.– Guy Duborg

Have you seen The Best of Enemies? It’s a documentary about the famous 1968 debates between William F. Buckley, Jr. and Gore Vidal. The whole thing culminates in a moment where — after heated exchange — Buckley, taking Vidal’s bait, explodes,

By EconMatters

Housing Demand Thesis

The last two years rents have been rising primarily due to supply and demand issues. There hasn`t been enough multifamily housing to keep up with the demand, and as the employment levels go up and more millennials move out of their parent`s house, I expect the housing market to continue to be on the slow but steady upswing of the last several years for 2016.

One year ago, when the brainwashed economist Ph.D intelligentsia was stampeding over each other to come up with the most hyperbolic terms to dub the recovery that would be unleashed on the economy as a result of plunging oil, and gas, prices - with "unambiguously good" being our personal favorite - we would write post after post explaining just how wrong this is, and how in a hyperfinancialized economy, a 2-year record collapse in oil prices is about as "unambiguously bad" as it gets, and not just only for the hundreds of thousands of highly paid energy sector workers who had been