The Bernanke Shock

The financial world was shocked this month by a demand from Germany's Bundesbank to repatriate a large portion of its gold reserves held abroad. By 2020, Germany wants 50% of its total gold reserves back in Frankfurt - including 300 tons from the Federal Reserve. The Bundesbank's announcement comes just three months after the Fed refused to submit to an audit of its holdings on Germany's behalf. One cannot help but wonder if the refusal triggered the demand.

Read more: http://finance.townhall.com/columnists/peterschiff/2013/02/05/the-bernanke-shock-n1505144?utm_source=thdaily&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=nl

Death By Doctor vs. Death By Firearms

The attacks on the Second Amendment, by government, has extended to persecuting a decorated war hero and charging him with five counts of third degree criminal possession of a weapon, for having completely empty 30 round AR-15 Magazines in his vehicle.
On January 6, 2013, a decorated combat veteran, Staff Sergeant Nathan Haddad, was driving through Jefferson County, New York when he was randomly pulled over at a Fourth Amendment violating warrantless vehicle checkpoint search. Haddad, who had five 30 round empty magazines in his vehicle, was arrested by the Jefferson County Sheriff’s Department and was charged with five separate felonies. If convicted on all counts, Haddad, could spend the majority of the rest of his life in prison.

Read more: http://www.thecommonsenseshow.com/2013/02/03/death-by-doctor-vs-death-by-firearms/

Fighting Government Cronyism with an Opportunity Agenda

For some workers, cronyism prevents receiving raises in pay. In early 2011, a Giant Eagle supermarket in Edinboro, Pennsylvania, wanted to give wage increases and higher starting wages to 25 employees. But a union wouldn’t let it do so.
Why would a union object to workers receiving higher wages? Because in this case, the increases went to “less senior” employees. The union went to arbitration and won a judgment that Giant Eagle can’t give raises “without first obtaining concurrence from the Union”—and an order to rescind those increases already given.

Read more: http://blog.heritage.org/2013/02/05/freeing-the-economy-getting-the-cronies-out-of-your-way/?utm_source=Newsletter&utm_medium=Email;utm_campaign=&utm_source=Newsletter&utm_medium=Email&utm_campaign=Morning%2BBell

NULLIFICATION DENIERS: WHAT JAMES MADISON REALLY SAID

This is The Age of Ignorance. Our “intellectuals” can’t think. Our “scholars” parrot each other. The self-educated fixate on idiotic theories. Our People despise Truth and disseminate lies.

Nullification deniers such as Matthew Spalding of Heritage Foundation, Jarrett Stepman of Human Events, law professor Randy Barnett, David Barton of Wallbuilders, and history professor Allen C. Guelzo, say that nullification by States of unconstitutional acts of the federal government is unlawful and impossible. They make the demonstrably false assertions that:

Read more: http://www.newswithviews.com/Publius/huldah115.htm

Prophets and Losses

The recent release of the Federal Reserve Board’s transcripts of its deliberations back in 2007 shows that their economic prophecies were way off. How much faith should we put in their prophecies today — or the policies based on those prophecies?
Even after the housing market began its collapse in 2006, Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke said in 2007, “The impact on the broader economy and financial markets of the problems in the subprime market seems likely to be contained.”
It turned out that financial disasters in the housing market were not “contained,” but spread out to affect the whole American economy and economies overseas. Then Chairman Bernanke said: “It is an interesting question why what looks like $100 billion or so of credit losses in the subprime market has been reflected in multiple trillions of dollars of losses in paper wealth.”

^{Read more: http://spectator.org/archives/2013/02/05/prophets-and-losses}

As Hillary Leaves

Hillary Clinton departed the State Department -- in those words of crooner Frank Sinatra -- softly. Her departure path is being strewn with palm fronds by a press corps that has always found her to be good ink and good think.

We should, at this leave-taking, give credit where credit is due. She was part of the Obama team's successful raid on Abbottabad, Pakistan. That raid was a masterpiece of military and diplomatic coordination. She was certainly right not to tell the Pakistanis what we intended to do. The quick burial at sea of Osama bin Laden's body was exactly the way to handle that matter. Even Winston Churchill would have approved.

Read more: http://www.americanthinker.com/2013/02/as_hillary_leaves.html#ixzz2K1QlD2Q1

Entrepreneurs, Risk Managers, and Uncertainty

Hyman Minsky offered profound thoughts about the economic dialectic between, as he characterized it, ‘entrepreneurs and bankers.’

Thomas Stanton’s 2012 study of comparative organizational performance during the great 21st-century financial crisis, Why Some Firms Thrive While Others Fail, cites Frank Knight’s 1921 classic, Risk, Uncertainty, and Profit. I consider Stanton’s theme to be how to address the unavoidable reality stated thus by Knight: “Uncertainty is one of the fundamental facts of life. It is … ineradicable from business decisions.”¹
As Stanton says, "Knight long ago distinguished risk, which can be quantified, from uncertainty, which requires judgment. Successful firms used judgment to add more protection than quantitative modeling would have suggested."<sup>2

Read more: http://www.american.com/archive/2013/february/entrepreneurs-risk-managers-and-uncertainty</sup>