by Joakim Book
The American Institute for Economic Research

In a throwaway line of green marketing for her country, Iceland’s Prime Minister Katrín Jakobsdóttir told the Financial Times in late March that her island in the mid-Atlantic should use its abundant energy not for bitcoin mining but for… growing corn(!).

In praising food sovereignty in a world of energy crises and supply chains and wars, she extended her current affairs talking-point bonanza by saying that “bitcoin is an issue worldwide,” that “data centres in Iceland use a significant share of our green energy,” and that under a new energy plan for the future, bitcoin would have no part in it.

We can learn a lot about trade, energy, agriculture, bitcoin mining, and political grandstanding from Ms. Jakobsdóttir’s statements, so let’s delve in.

Continue Reading at AIER.org…

from Liberty and Finance

Let’s just call this what it is: another gimmick for Congress to escape its own budget limits and avoid having a conversation about tradeoffs.

by Veronique de Rugy
Reason.com

This week, Congress moved closer to passing four separate bills with $95 billion in funding for Ukraine, Israel, Indo-Pacific allies, and the domestic submarine industrial base. This funding has been debated for months, with much of it intended for wars that have been going on—and likely will continue—for a while. In other words, it’s not new or surprising. Yet once again, it will be labeled “emergency spending,” a tool allowing legislators to double down on their fiscal irresponsibility.

Before I explain my objection to their behavior, I would like to make two points. The first one might be the most important: I don’t want you readers to get the impression that Congress is only irresponsible when using the emergency label to spend money. Congress is irresponsible all the time. Legislators have accumulated $34 trillion in debt without any real collective thinking about how to pay for it. The deficit is at 5.6 percent in a time when America is at peace and the economy is growing. They have done much of this deficit spending outside of the emergency process.

Continue Reading at Reason.com…

from Kitco NEWS

by Bob Parks
American Thinker

I’ll preface my commentary with the obvious: All of the “mostly peaceful” protests by our “college educated” on campuses nationwide that are clearly pro-Hamas and aimed at Jewish students are wrong, illegal, and all involved should either go back to the classes their parents and taxpayers are funding or be arrested and prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law.

But why the sudden sanctimonious outrage from the media and pundit class, billionaire donors, business leaders, and politicians? Why are the harassment and threats against Jewish students a red line that’s been crossed and now found to be totally unacceptable? It’s only because the current violence hits too close to home.

Several major donors have called a hard stop to their past donations:

Continue Reading at AmericanThinker.com…

from Dr. Steve Turley

“I wish I was more educated”

by Steve Watson
Modernity News

Video captured at New York University shows that some of the students protesting there have no idea why.

NYU is one of several campuses where so called ‘Gaza camps’ have been formed with students refusing to disperse.

Yet it seems that the students don’t really know what they are doing it for.

In the footage below, the videographer asks one of the protesters “What would you say is the main goal with tonight’s protest.”

She responds “I think the goal is just showing our support for Palestine and demanding that NYU stops – I honestly don’t know all of what NYU is doing.”

Continue Reading at Modernity.News…

from Wall Street Silver

by Michael Snyder
The Economic Collapse Blog

According to the absurd numbers that the government feeds us, the unemployment rate is very low and there are lots of jobs available. But if what they are telling us is true, why are so many Americans not able to find work? As you will see below, some people haven’t been hired even though they have literally applied for hundreds of jobs. There seems to be an enormous disconnect between what is actually happening in the real economy and the economic narrative that they are constantly pushing. By the time you are done reading this article, I think that you will agree with me.

Earlier this week, I received an email from a reader that has not been able to find work after seven months of searching.

He gave me permission to share part of that email with you, and it is certainly quite heartbreaking…

Continue Reading at TheEconomicCollapseBlog.com…

from MiningStockEducation.com

by John W. Whitehead and Nisha Whitehead
The Rutherford Institute

“It is the function of mass agitation to exploit all the grievances, hopes, aspirations, prejudices, fears, and ideals of all the special groups that make up our society, social, religious, economic, racial, political. Stir them up. Set one against the other. Divide and conquer. That’s the way to soften up a democracy.” – J. Edgar Hoover, Masters of Deceit

“Nothing is real,” observed John Lennon, and that’s especially true of politics.

Much like the fabricated universe in Peter Weir’s 1998 film The Truman Show, in which a man’s life is the basis for an elaborately staged television show aimed at selling products and procuring ratings, the political scene in the United States has devolved over the years into a carefully calibrated exercise in how to manipulate, polarize, propagandize and control a population.

Take the media circus that is the Donald Trump hush money trial, which panders to the public’s voracious appetite for titillating, soap opera drama, keeping the citizenry distracted, diverted and divided.

Continue Reading at Rutherford.org…

from Liberty and Finance

by James Rickards
Daily Reckoning

Does the Fed even matter that much to the real economy and investor portfolios?

That’s an important question that doesn’t get nearly enough scrutiny. It’s possible that neither the Fed nor the reporters who cover the Fed want to ask hard questions about what the Fed really does.

Could it be the case that the emperor has no clothes?

Financial journalists often refer to a Goldilocks economy (“not too hot, not too cold, just right!”) as a tribute to the Fed’s finesse in handling rates. It’s also called the “soft landing” scenario because the Fed supposedly tamed inflation without causing a recession.

These narratives have no factual foundations; they’re just stories designed to get you to buy stocks and pump up stock prices.

Continue Reading at DailyReckoning.com…

from GoldSilver (w/ Mike Maloney)

by Pam Martens and Russ Martens
Wall Street on Parade

Last Friday, the Federal Reserve released its semi-annual Financial Stability Report. In the prior five years, the spring edition of the Fed’s Financial Stability Report was released in May. This year, for reasons we can only guess at (nervously), the Fed released the spring edition early, in April.

Given that last spring the second, third and fourth largest bank failures in U.S. history occurred, handing over $30 billion in losses to the federal Deposit Insurance Fund, and one of those banks (Silicon Valley Bank) experienced the fastest run on its deposits in U.S. history, one particular item in the new report that caught our attention was this:

“Overall, estimated runnable money-like financial liabilities grew 8.8 percent to $21.3 trillion (75 percent of nominal GDP) over the past year, as a decline in uninsured deposits was more than offset by an increase in assets under management at MMFs [Money Market Mutual Funds]. As a share of GDP, runnable liabilities remained above their historical median.”

Continue Reading at WallStreetOnParade.com…

from AwakenWithJP

by Martin Armstrong
Armstrong Economics

The government has successfully weaponized the banks against the people. Major banks are voluntarily sharing customers’ private transactions with the federal government “as part of a wildly overbroad financial surveillance scheme intended to identify domestic terrorists,” a group of attorneys general wrote in a letter to Bank of America in regards to discrimination against Christian organizations. The American Accountability Foundation (AAF) is now exposing how banks are cracking down on legal firearm ownership as Washington moves to nullify the Second Amendment.

“Over the last decade, significant media attention has been paid to the left’s obsession with using banks and asset managers to end fossil fuels. Unfortunately, very little attention has been given on the left’s use of certain banks to chip away at legal private ownership and use of firearms,” the AAF Research Team wrote to Fox Business. “Unfortunately, law-abiding Americans who exercise their 2nd amendment rights have a proverbial bullseye on their backs placed there, in large part, by certain banks and their left-wing comrades who want to undermine Americans’ constitutional right to keep and bear arms.”

Continue Reading at ArmstrongEconomics.com…

from Dr. Steve Turley

by Charles Hugh Smith
Of Two Minds

This is why those who understand these dynamics are getting out, even though the city was their home.

A correspondent who prefers to remain anonymous sent me this account of the “doom loop” that is playing out in many American cities. The correspondent makes the case that the Doom Loop is not limited to specific cities, but is a universal dynamic in all US cities due to the core causes of the Doom Loop: financialization and the multi-decade decay of cities’ core industrial-economic purpose / mission.

I have edited the text slightly, with the correspondent’s approval.

The context of the Doom Loop is the process and politics of this decay are the second-order results of central bank easy money (free fiat). That led to financialization becoming the city’s core function and the subsequent loss of the city’s previous mission. The people living in cities just haven’t gotten the message yet.

Continue Reading at OfTwoMinds.com…

from Mark Dice

There is not one single historical example of collectivist/communist/authoritarian states that didn’t end up with mass atrocities, reduced prosperity and generally awful living conditions for the masses. We’re on that road again…

by Dr. Chris Martenson
Chris Martenson’s Peak Prosperity

You would have thought that after the massive Covid debacles, where government misinformation and disinformation led to untold thousands of unnecessary deaths and gaps within childhood development and education, “they” would have been chastened. Maybe slinked off to hide from their fellow humans out of shame.

But, no, that’s not how ‘they’ work. They double down when caught.

With Scotland’s recent “hate speech” laws somewhat out of the news, now it’s Canada’s and Australia’s turn to pick up the mantle of awful laws and rulings.

Not to be outdone, a quorum of traitors in the US Congress and Senate decided to extend and vastly expand the warrantless spying on US citizens, after carefully excluding themselves, of course.

Continue Reading at PeakProsperity.com…

from Viva Frei

by Wolf Richter
Wolf Street

Here’s why: New house prices -18% from peak, back to Nov 2021, further sweetened by mortgage-rate buydowns.

The median-price of new single-family houses at all stages of construction that were sold in March rose to $430,700, which was down by 1.9% from a year ago and by 18.2% from the peak in October 2022, according to data from the Census Bureau today (blue line in the chart below).

The three-month moving average median price – which irons out some of the very volatile data and includes all revisions – edged up to $419,500, which was down 3.5% year-over-year, down 2.7% from March 2022, down 11.8% from its peak in December 2022, and back where it had first been in November 2021 (red).

Continue Reading at WolfStreet.com…

from Trends Journal

by Clint Siegner
Silver Seek

The Silver Institute released its 2024 World Silver Survey

last week. According to the data, silver demand outstripped supply in 2023, for the fifth year in a row.

The deficit was just over 142 million ounces. And the forecast for 2024 indicates that the annual production shortfall will nearly double to 265 million ounces.

Silver prices have finally begun playing some catchup to gold. Perhaps speculators in the futures market have finally begun paying attention to fundamentals like supply and demand.

The overall supply deficit is corroborated by another data point. COMEX vault inventories of silver are also in decline.

Continue Reading at SilverSeek.com…

from ITM TRADING, INC.

by Karl Denninger
Market-Ticker.org

One has to wonder from the USSC arguments the other day.

Legal experts said the Biden administration was “on the ropes” in Tuesday’s oral arguments at the Supreme Court in a case questioning whether a Jan. 6 rioter can be charged with a federal “obstruction” crime, which carries implications for former President Trump.

On Tuesday, Jeffrey Green, lawyer for Joseph Fischer – who is one of more than 300 people charged by the Justice Department with “obstruction of an official proceeding” in the Jan. 6, 2021, riot at the Capitol – argued that the federal statute shouldn’t apply and that it had only ever been applied to evidence-tampering cases.

Biden’s DOJ has “repurposed” the SarBox law, in short, to bring the most-serious of felony charges in the Jan 6 cases, and has won many convictions on those charges. They also form the basis of the most-serious charges against Trump himself.

What’s also interesting is that in 2019 the OLC issued an opinion — which was never “formally” put into practice — that the law didn’t apply in this sort of situation at all. I was unaware of that but the case process that led to the Supremes hearing the case has brought that into the forefront.

Continue Reading at Market-Ticker.org…

from Gregory Mannarino