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

A Letter to George W. Bush and Dick Cheney from a Dying Iraq War Vet

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I write this letter on the 10th anniversary of the Iraq War on behalf of my fellow Iraq War veterans. I write this letter on behalf of the 4,488 soldiers and Marines who died in Iraq. I write this letter on behalf of the hundreds of thousands of veterans who have been wounded and on … Read more

Bitcoin iPhone App Downloads Soar in Spain as Price Hits New Record

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We all know that Europeans are scared to death about bank account confiscation after the Cyprus fiasco, and it seems some of them are turning to Bitcoin.  I read a fascinating article earlier today that showed how downloads for Bitcoin apps soared in the Spanish iPhone market over the weekend.  Now we see the price … Read more

HSBC Faces More Money Laundering Accusations

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I’m shocked.  Shocked, appalled, horrified and betrayed.  Actually, I’d be shocked if this didn’t happen.  From Reuters: BUENOS AIRES, March 18 (Reuters) – Argentina’s tax agency said on Monday it has uncovered 392 million pesos ($77 million) in fraudulent transactions by HSBC Holdings Plc and said it has asked the judicial system to probe the … Read more

License Plate Readers to Track Every Car Entering New York City

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Mayor Bloomberg’s little police state is coming along quite nicely, as the city plans license plate reader cameras “in every lane of traffic on all of the bridges and tunnels that serve as entrances and exits to Manhattan.”  Oh and they also want to add unmanned drones to keep an eye on the plebes. Don’t even think about trying to sneak a 64 oz soda into NYC, Big Brother Bloomie is watching you!

From the Huffington Post:

NEW YORK — The ring of steel is expanding. New York City Police Department Commissioner Raymond W. Kelly announced a “major project” at a budget hearing on Tuesday to install license plate reader cameras “in every lane of traffic on all of the bridges and tunnels that serve as entrances and exits to Manhattan.”

Soon, no one will be able to drive onto or off of the island without potentially being recorded.

Kelly also said the department has mounted a high-resolution camera on an NYPD helicopter and given it “sophisticated down-link technology to provide real-time, high-quality video of incidents as they unfold.” The commissioner has expressed interest in flying unmanned drones to watch over demonstrations as well.

Kelly did not state the cost of the license plate reader program. But along with data from other major NYPD electronic surveillance initiatives — the Argus cameras mounted on streets in neighborhoods and the Lower Manhattan Security Initiative that integrates private cameras from banks and other institutions — the license plate data will be fed into a $30-40 million comprehensive dashboard produced by Microsoft called the Domain Awareness System.

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Is the “Buy to Rent” Party Over?

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For well over a year now, I have been writing about how this whole “buy to rent” investment strategy is one of the biggest disasters waiting to happen within the U.S. economy.  I have repeatedly noted that these private equity clowns were crowding into these markets with reckless abandon and that this would ultimately crush their business model as there’s no way rents can rise enough to keep yields attractive in a country where most people are struggling to meet their daily expenses.  Well it seems the day of reckoning may be at hand.  From Bloomberg:

Rents for single-family homes are rising slower than property prices as firms such as Blackstone Group LP (BX) flood the market with homes for lease, posing risks to investors betting billions on the burgeoning market.

Monthly payments for properties in Phoenix rose 1.3 percent in February from a year earlier, compared with a 25 percent jump in for-sale asking prices, according to Trulia Inc. (TRLA), which operates an online listing service. In Atlanta, asking prices climbed 14 percent as single family rents gained 0.5 percent, and in Las Vegas rents dropped 1.7 percent even as asking prices soared 18 percent.

Seems like a fantastic business model…

“Investors are buying homes, in part, to rent them out, and that has added a lot of rental supply, and that’s preventing rents from rising,” Jed Kolko, San Francisco-based Trulia’s chief economist, said in a telephone interview. “It means some investors will start to think about selling those single-family rentals.”

“They’re effectively pushing prices up on each other,” Chang, a former Morgan Stanley housing analyst, said in a telephone interview.

Tina Africk, a Las Vegas broker who manages 60 single- family home rentals, said houses that might have rented in 30 days in the past can now take 60 to 90 days to fill, while rents have dropped about $100 a month from a year ago.

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Interview #3 with Blacklisted News: A Deep Dive Debate on Bitcoin

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I really had a ton of fun recording this interview a few days ago with the always excellent Blacklisted News.  We engage in a lively debate about Bitcoin, which should prove particularly interesting to those that are on the fence about the crypto-currency.  Doug is a skeptic and plays devil’s advocate on many occasions. That … Read more

Bruce Schneier: “The Internet is a Surveillance State”

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Last week, I wrote an article on “encryption” that highlighted Kim Dotcom’s effort to create an encrypted email service and Bitcoin’s successful foray into the creation of a decentralized crypto-currency.  Some of the feedback I received from several tech savvy people I know is that the spying is so pervasive there’s really no chance at true anonymity at the moment no matter what we do.  A few days later, this article by legendary American cryptographer and computer security specialist, Bruce Schneier came out.  Here’s what he had to say:

Increasingly, what we do on the Internet is being combined with other data about us. Unmasking Broadwell’s identity involved correlating her Internet activity with her hotel stays. Everything we do now involves computers, and computers produce data as a natural by-product. Everything is now being saved and correlated, and many big-data companies make money by building up intimate profiles of our lives from a variety of sources.

This is ubiquitous surveillance: All of us being watched, all the time, and that data being stored forever. This is what a surveillance state looks like, and it’s efficient beyond the wildest dreams of George Orwell.

This isn’t something the free market can fix. We consumers have no choice in the matter. All the major companies that provide us with Internet services are interested in tracking us. Visit a website and it will almost certainly know who you are; there are lots of ways to betracked without cookies. Cellphone companies routinely undo the web’s privacy protection. One experiment at Carnegie Mellon took real-time videos of students on campus and was able to identify one-third of them by comparing their photos with publicly available tagged Facebook photos.

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Wall Street: $474 Million, Detroit: 0

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The more time passes, the more skeletons emerge from the closet.  So what’s the punishment for an industry that has literally destroyed countless communities across the American landscape?  Trillions in taxpayer bailouts and even more control over our government.  They say “it would’ve been much worse without the bailouts.”  Tell that to Detroit.  From Bloomberg:

The only winners in the financial crisis that brought Detroit to the brink of state takeover are Wall Street bankers who reaped more than $474 million from a city too poor to keep street lights working. 

The city started borrowing to plug budget holes in 2005 under former Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick, who was convicted this week on corruption charges. That year, it issued $1.4 billion in securities to fund pension payments. Last year, it added $129.5 million in debt, 9.3 percent of its general-fund budget, in part to repay loans taken to service other bonds.

“We have no lights, no buses, poor streets and now we’re paying millions of dollars a year on our debt,” said David Sole, a retired municipal worker and advocate for Moratorium Now Coalition, a Detroit group that fights foreclosures and evictions. “The banks said they need to be paid first. But there is no money.”

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GATA Meets CNBC: Host Calls Gold Market a “Matrix”

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First off, fantastic job by Chris Powell in this interview.  The host cracked me up when he describes the gold market as “almost like the matrix.”  My favorite line from Chris is when he says “the banks are bigger than the government.”  Those two lines sum up a lot of what’s wrong with the world … Read more

Food Stamp Use in NYC Doubles Under Bloomberg: 1.8 Million are on EBT

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Good thing Mayor Bloomberg has his priorities straight.  Just think about it, had he not focused so heavily on banning large sodas he could’ve actually focused on the fact that 1.8 million New York City resident are on food stamps. That’s an incredible 22% of the city’s population.  That’s not it either.  While Bloomberg spends … Read more