Michael Krieger

My name is Michael Krieger, and I am the creator and editor of Liberty Blitzkrieg. I'm originally from New York City.

As far as my academic and professional background, I attended college at Duke University where I earned a double major in Economics and Spanish. After completing my studies in 2000, I took a job at Lehman Brothers where I worked with the Oil analyst in the Equity Research Department.  In 2005, I joined Sanford C. Bernstein where I served as the Commodities Analyst on the trading floor. About halfway through my time there, I started to branch out and write opinions on bigger picture "macro" topics that no one else at the firm was covering. These opinion pieces were extremely popular throughout the global investment community, and I traveled around providing advice to some of the largest mutual funds, pension funds and hedge funds in the world.

I loved my job, but as time passed I started to educate myself about how the monetary and financial system functions and what I discovered disgusted me. I no longer felt satisfied working within the industry, and I resigned in January 2010.  At that point, I started a family investment office and continued to write macro pieces on economic, social and geopolitical topics. That summer, I drove cross country for six weeks and ultimately decided to leave the crowded streets of Manhattan for the open spaces of Boulder, Colorado, where I currently reside.

In the years that followed, I gradually recognized that my true passion centers upon writing on issues of significant societal importance given the extremely challenging times we live in. This realization culminated with me losing interest in financial markets and eventually launching this website in early 2012.

If you are interested in a more detailed description, replete with colorful anecdotes, of how I ended up making this bizarre professional transition, take the time to watch the video below.

https//www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/DcqMN-FXCIE?rel=0

In Liberty,
Michael Krieger

PayPal Gets Serious About Bitcoin – Is the Price About to Move?

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Screen Shot 2014-09-23 at 12.57.06 PMI haven’t written much about Bitcoin as of late. While the positive fundamental news has continued to pour in with regard to adoption and venture capital investment, watching the price action has felt like watching paint peel off a wall.

When friends have asked me about the price action as of late, I only note the bizarre discrepancy between the fundamentals and price. One reason for this seems to be muted buying interest, coupled with miners who have already invested heavily in mining equipment, selling their reward blocks immediately in order to recoup some of their capital investment and offset energy costs. In addition, while banks have stated they are holding off with regard to Bitcoin until there is more regulatory certainty, it appears clear to me that the big banks are doing everything they can to stall Bitcoin adoption. This was confirmed last week when banks cracked down on the exponentially growing Bitcoin ecosystem in the Isle of Man.

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Afghan President Hamid Karzai Slams U.S. Foreign Policy in Farewell Speech

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Screen Shot 2014-09-23 at 10.52.56 AMYou’ve got to hand it to the brain surgeons running America’s foreign policy. They possess an uncanny ability to seamlessly forge alliances, break alliances and turn former allies into existential enemies, while simultaneously demonizing regimes, making amends with demonized regimes, and then quickly forming alliances with the same bitter enemies.

Friends become enemies and enemies become friends in the blink of an eye. This is what happens when a global empire possesses no real foreign policy other than the pursuit of economic opportunities for mega corporations and the military-industrial complex. The result is perpetual war, countless dead and injured young men and women, and billions of riches for a small and ruthless cadre of oligarchs. This is American foreign policy and those are its results.

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Welcome to the Oligarchy – United States Leads the Developed World in Share of Low Wage Jobs

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Screen Shot 2014-09-22 at 1.18.23 PMIn an apparent attempt to advise investors on how they can take advantage of America’s transformation into a neo-feudal oligarchy in a 50 page research report, Morgan Stanley has put together some very interesting charts that were highlighted earlier today by MarketWatch.

While I suggest taking a look through all of the charts, none of them is more telling and depressing than the one that shows how the U.S. leads the developed world in the share of low wage jobs. See below:

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Video of the Day – This is What Happens When You Try to Exercise Your Constitutional Rights in Illinois

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Screen Shot 2014-09-22 at 10.59.13 AMWhat follows is the most powerful recorded police checkpoint scene I have witnessed since posting: Extremely Powerful Video – Happy 4th of July from a Police State Checkpoint, last summer. 

While the former incident happened in Tennessee, the following occurred in Illinois. The American pleb who was accosted by Illinois State Police was DeKalb resident Ryan Scott. While it starts off slow, make sure you watch it all the way to the end. While one of the the police officers is reasonable, the other one can’t stop yelling and seems to derive a particular pleasure from repeatedly informing the citizen he supposed to “protect and serve” that “driving is not a right, it’s a privilege.” See for yourself:

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Fear and Loathing in Scotland – Why the NO’s Won and Lessons Learned from the Vote

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Screen Shot 2014-09-19 at 9.49.01 AMYesterday morning, as I sat down for my ritualistic dose of caffeine and began to write, I noticed that I had auspiciously planted myself in front of two older women from the UK. One was from Scotland, the other from somewhere else in the United Kingdom with an accent I couldn’t quite place. The non-Scottish woman asked her friend for thoughts on the independence referendum. The Scottish woman replied that she would have voted “YES,” but that her friends were all voting “NO.” She said that “they were afraid.”

Upon overhearing this, I felt a pit form in my stomach. Almost all of the enthusiasm that I had for the day was immediately drained. Not only was I excited to see a historically defiant and proud people vote for independence, but yesterday marked the launch of the Contributor section of Liberty Blitzkrieg. It was a big day for me, yet all of a sudden it was as if the atmosphere suddenly evaporated and despair filled the air. Although no results had yet been reported, I knew the result. It was going to be NO.

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Introducing Liberty Blitzkrieg Contributors

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Liberty Blitzkrieg was launched two and a half years ago on April 19th, 2012, the day after the 237th anniversary of Paul Revere’s ride. It has been one of the most rewarding experiences of my life, and if not for the tremendous support of my faithful readers, would not have been possible. The interest my work has generated, the thoughtful email messages of encouragement, the passionate comments, and of course the generous and entirely voluntary Bitcoin donations has touched me and inspired me to improve my writing and content generation every single day.

When I first started out, I figured maybe a few hundred people would come and visit per day. As 2014 comes to a close, those expectations have been exceeded greatly, with Liberty Blitzkrieg averaging 65,000 unique visitors and 123,000 page views per month so far this year. What can I say except: Thank You!

My philosophy on writing has always been, and continues to be, that I’d prefer to write one or two powerful and incisive posts per day, rather than five or six watered down articles. As such, I feel my current capacity for daily content is more or less maxed out. This leaves me with a great deal of topics left unaddressed, partly due to personal time constraints, but also because I lack the expertise and interest to cover certain subjects. Enter Contributors.

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Video of the Day: The Republic of Bill

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I saw this video a couple of weeks back, but never got around to posting it. The Republic of Bill sounds like a pretty great place. Where do I sign up? In Liberty, Michael Krieger Like this post? Donate bitcoins: 35DBUbbAQHTqbDaAc5mAaN6BqwA2AxuE7G Follow me on Twitter.

It’s Not Just the Police – The Feds are Also Militarizing Public Schools with Grenade Launchers, M16s and Tanks

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Screen Shot 2014-09-17 at 12.35.53 PMEvents last month in Ferguson, Missouri (read my detailed thoughts here) forced Americans to confront the frightening reality that many of of the nation’s police departments have been quietly, but consistently, militarizing over the past couple of decades. It’s one thing to intellectually understand that this has happened, it’s quite another to see cops deploy tanks and point sniper rifles at peacefully protesting U.S. citizens.

Just as disturbing as the scenes themselves, is the fact that this has been happening for so long under the 1033 transfer program with only muted criticism. The program was originated in the late 1990’s under the National Defense Authorization Act of 1997 (recall that the NDAA is also being used to allow for the indefinite detention of American citizens without trial), and it allows for the transfer of excess Department of Defense equipment to domestic police. In other words, it has been public policy for almost two decades to militarize the police.

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The FBI Unveils its Controversial Facial Recognition Database with 52 Million Photos to be Stored

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Screen Shot 2014-09-16 at 12.25.38 PMIn April of this year, I highlighted the FBI’s disturbing and Orwellian plan to launch a massive biometric database known as the Next Generation Identification (NGI) System in the post, FBI Plans to Have 52 Million Photos in Facial Recognition Database by 2015. In that piece I noted that:

The latest article from the EFF that caught my attention was published a couple of days ago, and shines light on the disturbing push by the FBI to create an extensive facial recognition database, which will include criminal and non-criminal photos alike. The information received by the EFF via a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request, demonstrates that the feds may have a mugshot database with up to 52 million photos by 2015.

The program is called Next Generation Identification (NGI), and the aspect of it that bothers the EFF most is the fact that non-criminal and criminal photos will be combined in the same database. So someone who has no criminal record can suddenly be flagged as a suspect just because an algorithm says so. What’s worst, research shows that the potential for false positive identification increases as the dataset increases.

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Why You Should Think Twice Before Using Facebook’s Messenger App

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Screen Shot 2014-09-15 at 3.30.31 PM

 

 

 

“Messenger appears to have more spyware type code in it than I’ve seen in products intended specifically for enterprise surveillance.”

– Jonathan Zdziarski, expert in iOS related digital forensics and security

Anyone who reads Liberty Blitzkrieg consistently will be aware of my disdain for the company Facebook. There are many reasons for my negative sentiments, but at its core is the company’s complete disrespect toward its own users.

Facebook made major headlines earlier this summer when it was caught in a massive controversy over its decision to intentionally manipulate its users’ feeds in order to affect their emotional state, something I covered in the article: Was the Department of Defense Behind Facebook’s Controversial Manipulation Study? 

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