Liberty Links 2/17/19

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Top Links

Do You Believe in the Deep State Now? (The American Conservative)

Senate Has Uncovered No Direct Evidence of Conspiracy Between Trump Campaign and Russia (You don’t say…NBC)

U.S. National Debt Soars to a Record $22 Trillion (Bloomberg)

U.S. Student Debt in ‘Serious Delinquency’ Tops $166 Billion (Bloomberg)

Auto-Loan Delinquencies Are the Highest Since 2012 (Bloomberg)

Apple and Google Accused of Helping ‘Enforce Gender Apartheid’ by Hosting Saudi Government App That Tracks Women and Stops Them Leaving the Country (Business Insider)

Fed to Finalize Plans to End Balance Sheet Runoff ‘at Coming Meetings’: Mester (They are panicking, Reuters)

Trump Shouldn’t Take the Easy Way Out Over China (Bloomberg)

Yes, Moscow Boosts Western Anti-Imperialist Voices. So What? (Caitlin Johnstone, Medium)

U.S. News/Politics

Rebuking Trump, House Passes Measure to End U.S. Involvement in Yemen (Congress does something good for once, NBC)

Amazon Pulls Out of Planned New York City Headquarters (The New York Times)

Facebook Uses Its Apps to Track Users It Thinks Could Threaten Employees and Offices (CNBC)

GOP Livid with Trump over Ignored Khashoggi Report (Politico)

U.S. Tax Refunds down Nearly 9 Percent vs Year Ago: IRS Data (Reuters)

International News/Geopolitics

The U.S. Is Stepping up Pressure on Europe to Ditch Huawei (CNN)

Macron Under Fire After Attempted Search of French News Outlet Mediapart (If this happened in Venezuela you’d hear about it 24/7, The Washington Post)

German Anger Builds over Dangerous Handling of Brexit by EU Ideologues (The Telegraph)

Blackwater Mercenary Prince Has a New $1 Trillion Chinese Boss (Bloomberg)

Air Charter Firm, Client Both Deny Role in Alleged Shipment of Arms to Venezuela (McClatchy)

Economy/Finance/Crypto

‘Like Pulling Teeth’: In Trade Talks, China and U.S. Said to Be Far Apart on Structural Changes by Beijing (South China Morning Post)

China Bulks up on Gold Reserves for a Second Consecutive Month (FT)

Wall Street Firm Says There Is Now a ‘Strong Case’ for Gold over Bonds, Stocks (CNBC)

GOP Sen Marco Rubio Takes Aim at Stock Buybacks, an Issue Under Attack by Democrats (CNBC)

West Coast Real Estate Is Now so Expensive That Married Couples Are Moving in with Multiple Roommates (MarketWatch)

The Federal Reserve Seems Oblivious to a Coming Crisis (Barron’s)

Goldman Drops Strong Balance Sheet Recommendation on Dovish Fed (Yes the economy is a farce, Bloomberg)

The Beginning of the End – Peter Schiff (YouTube)

Amazon Buys Mesh Wifi Startup Eero to Connect Smart Homes (The tech giants gobble up and consume everything, Engadget)

JP Morgan Is Rolling out the First Us Bank-Backed Cryptocurrency to Transform Payments Business (Lots of hype about nothing, CNBC)

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4 thoughts on “Liberty Links 2/17/19”

  1. Thanks for the ad removal Michael!

    I donate annually, and pledge to continue to do so.

    Thanks for all the curating and commentary.

    Reply
  2. Who is this cycle’s Bernie Madoff?

    Guy Adami Retweeted Jennifer Ablan
    , The Federal Reserve

    https://twitter.com/GuyAdami/status/1097175346779176963

    Chancellor: A 300-year lesson in bubble inflation

    The bank was only part of Law’s scheme. He also took over a trading company, known popularly as the Mississippi Company, which laid claim to much of the current United States. He proposed that the company should take over the entire national debt, roughly equivalent to France’s national output. The idea was that the king’s creditors, known as “rentiers”, would swap their securities for Mississippi Company shares. The success of this scheme depended on pushing down the rate of interest and inflating the price of the shares.

    That’s where the Banque Royale came in. In the year after nationalisation, the bank increased its note issue from 40 million livres to over a billion. Interest rates in France fell from 6 percent to under 2 percent. The Mississippi shares soared from a price of 500 livres to nearly 10,000. Given that at the peak the dividend yield was 2 percent, Law argued the shares weren’t overvalued. Likewise, it has been claimed in the post-Lehman Brothers age that U.S. stocks were not expensive relative to the yield on U.S. Treasuries, notwithstanding the fact that American rates were artificially suppressed by the Federal Reserve’s actions.

    France boomed, unemployment disappeared and the sovereign debt crisis was forgotten. Such was the magical effect of paper money. Or was this prosperity, as some contemporaries suspected, merely a chimera? In the early stages, the Banque Royale’s notes weren’t used for normal commercial activities. Instead, they were supplied to speculators as loans to buy shares. The company supported its own share price, by borrowing and buying back a vast amount of its own stock, in much the same manner as corporations in recent years have used cheap credit to repurchase trillions of dollars’ worth of shares.

    The parallels between the Mississippi saga and the monetary experiments following the 2008 crisis are ubiquitous. Both episodes start with a financial and economic crisis and the threat of deflation. Both are followed by a miracle monetary cure, which inflated bubbles across various asset classes. At points in 2018, the U.S. stock market was trading at a higher valuation level than at any time apart from the dotcom bubble. On a dividend-yield basis, the S&P 500 Index remains somewhat more expensive than the Mississippi Company at its peak.

    The trouble is that modern central bankers have failed to heed the lessons of the Mississippi bubble. As one of Law’s biographers, Antoin Murphy, writes: “What central bankers are doing now is exactly what Law recommended … From this perspective, it may be argued that, notwithstanding the failure of the Mississippi System, Law’s banking successors have been Ben Bernanke, Janet Yellen and Mario Draghi.”

    https://www.reuters.com/article/us-global-cenbank-breakingviews/breakingviews-chancellor-a-300-year-lesson-in-bubble-inflation-idUSKCN1Q2165?mc_cid=4074d44609&mc_eid=6ef2b8cb0a

    ..I expect before the coming bull market in gold and silver concludes, we’ll see gold trading for far above $30,000 dollars and silver well above $3000. How is that possible? …

    http://3.boards.net/post/6763/thread

    The Untold Story Of Nixon And The $35 Gold Peg
    https://www.gold-eagle.com/article/untold-story-nixon-and-35-gold-peg

    Reply
  3. I gather you fallow Armstrong Economics , and the comming implosion of the debt / government cycles , ( and socialism ) thank god !
    From your great work we gleen a look into the reasons for the comming end and those who are directly responsible .
    Your piece about Mcabe is a great read albeit no surprise.
    “Power corrupts & absolute power corrupts absolutely . ”
    Should any sane persone dispute this fact ??? Can hardly wait for this shame ” we call government” to come crashing down to an end … then we will be able to throw responsible of a cliff !!

    Reply

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