What happens when commodities are badly mispriced because off too many financial-only speculators distorting the price signal? Eventually, it’s big trouble. What happens if the yen completely melts down? I don’t know, but it looks like we’re going to find out.
by Dr. Chris Martenson
Chris Martenson’s Peak Prosperity
The Japanese central bank apparently used tens of billions of dollars of firepower to drive the price of the yen back up compared to the US dollar, but accomplished very little. This is the sort of comprehensive failure one sees before TSHTF.
The last time we had an Asian currency crisis, things were extremely turbulent and dicey. And that was back in 1997 when global leverage was a fraction of its current values. Who knows how turbulent things could get this time?
Next, the story of copper is a real head-scratcher if you come at it from a fundamental, logical angle. The basic conundrum is that the current price of copper is barely 1/3rd that needed to justify opening a new mine.
President Joe Biden says, “I know how to make government work!”
Rate-Cut Mania died, mortgage rates re-jumped to 7.5% today, but here’s what home prices did during Rate-Cut Mania.
American foreign policy has been lurching along for decades now, ever since the end of the Cold War, without sufficient clarity. What are our goals as a nation, and how might we best achieve them? There have been times in the course of American history when the nation had genuine strategic clarity, such as when it went to war against the Axis following the attack at Pearl Harbor. In that instance, the United States properly assessed what it wanted to achieve — the unconditional surrender of the Axis Powers — how it might best go about achieving that end, and proceeded to marshal its resources to ensure success. Clearly, the use of military force is warranted when critical US interests are at stake, such as when an aggressive rival hegemon (like Nazi Germany or Imperial Japan) threatens to dominate a key region, and there are no alternatives to using force. Problems have arisen when the United States has used significant military force in cases when important US interests are not at stake, or in instances when non-military means could have been used.
The campuses of America’s colleges and universities are awash in Marxist ideology and tolerance for Fascist/Nazi tactics as well as cowardice and lemminglike groupthink by professors and presidents. The chaotic and perilous end-product of these mindsets is what Americans are witnessing today in the virulent antisemitism, support for Islamic terrorism, and anti-Americanism at so many colleges and universities.
In a video going viral online, a man describes how his Hyundai Kona EV installed geo-tracking technology in the vehicle without his consent.
Parsing geopolitics is fun but our attention is better directed to the limits and second-order effects of legacy systems in each of the rival states.
They’re wearing us down with shocking headlines and opinions. They come daily these days, with increasingly implausible claims that leave your jaw on the floor.
Quietly on Friday, the FDIC announced the first federally-insured bank failure of 2024, the publicly-traded Republic First Bancorp (ticker FRBK) which did business as Republic Bank. In an unsettling sign of the times, this federally-insured bank was trading at 1-cent on Friday; down from 27-1/2 cents last September when we first reported on its dire condition.