Tag: economy

How Free Markets Should Work

The call for government intervention into market pricing is ancient. This call was resisted politically in the West until the decade before World War I began. After that war ended in 1918, the West saw the triumph of the isms: Communism, Fascism, National Socialism, Fabianism, and the smaller isms that arose in the wake of the larger isms.

Calls for government intervention into the price system have multiplied. Hazlitt’s book dealt with lots of these calls. But these calls have played second fiddle in the West to three government-bankrupting ideas: government pensions, government health care for the aged, and military empire. Europe is further along the path to bankruptcy because of the first two programs, along with government health care for the whole population. The United States has specialized in war since 1946.

Because of the price-disrupting effects of central banking and fractional reserve banking—both of which are government-licensed monopolies—the state’s interventions in these closely related sectors of the economy have subsidized the allocation of capital away from what consumers would have chosen, had politically favored special-interest groups not been furnished with fiat money. The economy of the world is now addicted to monetary inflation. Among modern economists, Austrian School economic analysis alone focuses on these disrupting effects. This outlook is not known by the public, and it is rejected by academic economists.

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China calls on banks to limit exposure to US debt – Bloomberg

China has urged its banks to curb their exposure to US government debt, citing market volatility and growing financial and geopolitical risks, Bloomberg has reported citing people familiar with the matter.

Over the past decade, China has steadily trimmed its US Treasury holdings, a shift that has seen it overtaken by Japan and the UK as the largest foreign holders of American debt. Since peaking at around $1.3 trillion in 2013, its holdings have fallen roughly by half to about $650–700 billion, reaching levels not seen since 2008.

Beijing has advised China’s major financial institutions to limit new purchases of US government bonds and reduce positions where exposure is high, according to sources who spoke to the outlet on Monday. The guidance reportedly does not apply to Beijingss’s official state holdings.

According to the report, which cited China’s State Administration of Foreign Exchange, Chinese banks held about $298 billion in dollar-denominated bonds as of September. It is unclear how much of that total consisted of US Treasuries.

The guidance, reportedly intended to diversify market risk, came ahead of last week’s phone call between Chinese President Xi Jinping and his US counterpart, Donald Trump. In October, the two leaders agreed to a one-year trade truce, under which tariffs and export controls on each other’s goods would be lowered.

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Ed Dowd Exposes the $1.5 Trillion Lie Keeping the U.S. Economy Alive

A $1.5 trillion lie is propping up the U.S. economy—and Ed Dowd warns the collapse is already underway.

He says the real reason deportations are being delayed is because kicking illegals out too fast would crash the entire economy.

Dowd called it a scam so massive it rivaled COVID—propped up by Treasury money, shadow banking, and silence.

He also claims the now-defunct DOGE program was dismantled because it exposed just how deep the fraud really goes…

Back in December, he warned we were “At the Beginning of Credit Destruction Cycle.” 

Now that cycle is accelerating. ZeroHedge just reported that BlackRock—the world’s largest asset manager—cut the value of one of its private debt funds by 19% and waived fees.

So Ed was right. He’s right a lot. And now he’s warning we may be just months away from a full-blown economic collapse.

“I’ve never seen risk like this before in my career.”

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The Great Taking: Global Looting of Humanity Imminent?

When the globalist World Economic Forum (WEF) predicted in 2015 that “you will own nothing and be happy” by 2030, people worldwide recoiled in horror at the thought, but almost nobody understood the mechanism by which it might take place. Now, thanks to brave whistleblowers and attorneys, the plan to seize virtually everything is plain to see. The real question at this point is: Can it be stopped before it’s too late? 

If the WEF’s Great Reset is the marketing campaign for global “transformation,” what retired investment banker David Webb calls “The Great Taking” is the legal and financial machinery designed to make the transformation unavoidable. The plan involves ending private-property rights in securities — stocks, bonds, and other financial instruments — to allow mega-banks allied with governments to take everything when the next crisis hits.

In essence, you no longer own your securities; the deed has already been done. The stocks and bonds in your retirement and investment accounts may seem like they are yours. But thanks to little-noticed changes in state law going back decades, they are actually not. And when a major economic and financial cataclysm strikes, the Deep State establishment and the governments and megabanks it controls will take over everything from you.   

Great Reset Reality

If the scheme is not stopped, the World Economic Forum’s prediction that “you will own nothing” could become a reality in the not-too-distant future. Imagine: Ownership and control of every publicly traded company in the hands of a tiny, megalomaniacal elite. And this plan is not just for the United States, but for the world.

Webb, who first blew the whistle on the scheme to steal all securities in recent years with a book and documentary that went viral, explains the operation in terms any non-finance person can understand. For centuries, stocks and bonds were treated as personal property, which insulated the public from failures inside the financial system.

“For hundreds of years … securities were your property,” he explained to this writer during a 2025 interview. “If the banker or the custodian failed … that was entirely their problem.” Historically, the investor could simply tell those holding the securities, “here’s where you send my stuff.” But that “bulletproof” protection is now gone, he warned.

“Security Entitlement”

In fact, even the direct record of ownership has been severed. Securities are now held in pooled form. And what investors possess is not ownership, but a legal abstraction. “You no longer have a property right — you have what’s called a security entitlement,” warned Webb.

Right now, that may not seem too important. After all, you can still call you broker, put in a sell order, and receive your cash. But when the next crisis hits — and many experts and economists believe it could be just around the corner — the significance of this change will be clear.   

This concept was first embedded into American law through amendments adopted across the states beginning in 1994. In short, through seemingly minor changes to commercial and contract law adopted quietly nationwide, Americans were stripped of their property rights to their securities.

The practical consequence is stark: “If the intermediary fails, you have no right to take your property back,” Webb explained.

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Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey is Suddenly Concerned About His City’s Sanctuary Based Economy 

Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey has a new excuse for wanting ICE to leave the city. He claims the presence of ICE is disrupting the city’s economy.

Back in 2020, when BLM activists and Antifa were quite literally burning the city down, do you recall Mayor Frey releasing this type of message?

It’s apparently not a problem for the small business owners of Minneapolis to be completely terrorized by left wing radicals, but ICE agents enforcing federal immigration law is just a bridge too far.

Breitbart News makes another great point about this. Through his sanctuary city policy, Frey has allowed the city’s economy to become sanctuary based. The enforcement of immigration law is actually bad for the city because of this:

Minneapolis Mayor: Law Enforcement Wrecks My Sanctuary City Economy

Frey’s complaint is plausible because Democrats have built the city’s economy on a peculiar institution — the government’s long-term delivery of many foreign workers, consumers, and renters. That historically bizarre foundation is fundamentally different from — and corrosive too — the typical free, level, and uniform marketplace rules that govern American citizens, whether they are employers or employees.

Minneapolis’s resulting “Sanctuary City Economy” enables and worsens many civic problems, including a high share of lower-productivity workers, and the conflicts caused by having residents with illegal, uncertain, or subsidiary legal status.

The city also struggles with two-jurisdiction communities, corrupt business practices, politicized agencies, patronage politics, high taxes, a pay-to-play political machine, scare politics, the loss of high-productivity jobs, large wealth disparities, private regulation, vigilante crime, low-income ethnic enclaves, political instability, and a pro-establishment media.

And of course, Frey has nothing to say about left wing radicals setting up their own checkpoints in the city, This can’t be good for the local economy.

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The US Economy In A Nutshell: A Few Winners, Everyone Else Loses Ground

Here’s the US economy in a nutshell: corporate/state concentrations of financial, market and political power are the winners, and everyone outside these fortresses is losing ground. The Wall Street Journal is generally viewed as pro-business, and so it’s particularly striking when the WSJ published this:

The Economic Divide Between Big and Small Companies Is Growing: Economic fortunes of low- and high-income Americans are diverging–same pattern happening with companies. (WSJ.com)

–The growing divide between the fortunes of small and large businesses mirrors the divide that has emerged over the past year between low-income Americans and their high-income counterparts.

–Large, publicly traded companies in the S&P 500 saw net income increase by 12.9% in the third quarter, contrasting with faltering small-business profits.

–Small businesses are facing economic headwinds, including high inflation and cautious consumers, leading to job cuts; 120,000 jobs were shed in November.

In other words, the small circle of winners and the larger circle of those losing ground describes both households and enterprises: small businesses–lacking the concentrated financial / political power to exercise monopoly-cartel control of their market and protect their fiefdom by buying political influence–are in steep decline–and this is in “good times,” i.e. the economy is expanding, not contracting in a recession.

As in the household sector, the winners are doing splendidly while everyone else loses ground. The media–controlled by the winners, of course–tout the winners as if they’re the norm rather than the outliers in a winner take most economy.

The quasi-monopolies and cartels of Corporate America reign supreme: trillion-dollar valuations, soaring profits, unmatched political and market control. Small business, whose interests are diffuse and widely distributed, are reduced to tax donkeys struggling to pay soaring rent, wages, utilities and overhead costs without the market muscle of monopolies / cartels to force consumers to pay higher prices for degraded goods and services.

The top 10% of households are also doing extremely well, accounting for fully half of all consumer spending as their earnings, passive investment income and assets all bubble higher.

A few of these top earning households are blue-collar households with workers earning top pay due to scarcity of their skillsets, but most are working in the state / corporate sectors with the power to pay high wages and benefits regardless of what’s happening to the bottom 90%.

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IT BEGINS: Zohran Mamdani Announces Plans to ‘Tax the Wealthy’ to Compensate for NYC Budget Deficit 

Well that was fast.

Zohran Mamdani has been mayor of New York City for less than a month and he is already talking about raising taxes on the ‘wealthy’ to make up the city’s budget deficit, which he claims is on par with the Great Recession.

Get ready to see a lot of Uhauls leaving the city.

CNBC reports:

New York Mayor Mamdani says city must hike taxes on wealthy to fill $12 billion deficit

New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani on Wednesday said the city’s wealthiest must pay more in taxes to help fill the staggering budget deficit of more than $12 billion that he was left by his predecessor.

“This is at a scale that’s actually greater than what we saw here in New York City during the Great Recession,” Mamdani said of that budget hole during an interview with CNBC “Squawk Box” co-anchor Andrew Ross Sorkin at City Hall.

The Democrat, who took office on Jan. 1 after campaigning on a platform of hiking taxes on the rich, attributed the big deficit to “gross fiscal mismanagement.”

He pointed to actions taken by former Mayor Eric Adams, and by ex-New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo, whom he soundly defeated in the November general election, for causing that budget gap.

Mamdani vowed that his administration will be up front with New Yorkers about budget issues that have been “hidden from them for far too long.”

City Comptroller Mark Levine earlier this month said the new mayor faces a budget shortfall that is projected to total $12.6 billion over the next two fiscal years.

That comprises a $2.2 billion projected deficit on the city’s nearly $116 billion budget for fiscal 2026, which ends on June 30, and a $10.4 billion gap in fiscal 2027.

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Gretchen Whitmer Defends Abortion: Killing Babies for Profit is “Just Good Economics”

Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer defended the killing of unborn babies in abortions Wednesday during her State of the State address, claiming pro-abortion laws are “just good economics.”

Whitmer, a pro-abortion Democrat, was re-elected to office in November along with a new Democrat-controlled state legislature. Together, they have promised to repeal a 1931 state abortion ban and ensure that abortion on demand remains legal in Michigan for years to come.

Speaking at the state Capitol in Lansing, Whitmer made the argument that killing unborn babies in abortions is good for the economy, according to a video of her speech from The Recount.

Portraying abortion as a “freedom” and a “right,” she said: “Protecting these freedoms is the right thing to do, and it’s just good economics. States with extreme laws are losing talent and investment, because you know what? Bigotry is bad for business.”

The Democrat governor promoted killing unborn babies even while promising to work for a “brighter future” for all Michigan residents, State of Reform reports.

“I can’t wait to share my vision for our state as we move towards our bright future, and lay out my plans to lower costs, bring supply chains and manufacturing home to Michigan, and ensure Michiganders have unparalleled economic opportunity and personal freedom,” she said ahead of her speech.

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“Emergency Intervention”: Trump To Cap Residential Electric Bills By Forcing Tech Giants To Pay For Soaring Power Costs

Back in August, when the American population was just waking up to the dire consequences the exponentially growing army of data centers spawned across the country was having on residential electricity bills, we said that the chart of US CPI would soon become the most popular (not in a good way) chart in the financial realm.

One month later we added that it was only a matter of time before Trump, realizing that soaring electricity costs would almost certainly cost Republicans the midterms, would enforce price caps.

Turns out we were right.

And while Trump obviously can not pull a communist rabbit out of his hat, and centrally plan the entire US power grid, what he can do is precisely what he is about to announce. 

According to Bloomberg, Trump and the governors of several US Northeastern states agreed to push for an emergency wholesale electricity auction that would compel technology companies to effectively fund new power plants, effectively putting a cap for residential power prices at the expense of hyperscalers and data centers. Which, come to think of it, we also proposed back in October.

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92% Of Employed Americans Have Cut Back On Spending As The Standard Of Living In The US Crumbles

The headline of this article is not a misprint.  The reason why “affordability” has become the number one issue for U.S. voters is because most of the population is being absolutely crushed by the rising cost of living.  

Just look at how much you are paying for electricity compared to five years ago.  And just look at how much you are paying for food compared to five years ago.  Housing costs have risen to absurd heights, property taxes have become absolutely insane in many areas of the country, and health insurance premiums have more than doubled for millions of Americans.  It isn’t just a coincidence that so many people are bitterly complaining about the cost of living these days.  The truth is that most of the country is experiencing very real pain.

Of course it isn’t an accident that this has happened.  Our politicians have borrowed and spent 28 trillion dollars that we did not have since Barack Obama first entered the White House in January 2009, and I warned that all of this money would create rampant inflation.

On top of that, the Federal Reserve has pumped trillions of dollars that were created out of thin air into the financial system since 2008.  That has helped the stock market hit record highs, but it has been one of the factors that has made the cost of living unbearable for the rest of us.

The very foolish decisions that our leaders have been making have had dramatic consequences.

Our standard of living is crumbling right in front of our eyes, and now a brand new report is telling us that 92 percent of employed Americans have been forced to cut back on spending…

For millions of Americans, staying financially afloat now means difficult trade-offs. As the price of everyday necessities continues to rise faster than wages, new data shows workers are cutting back wherever they can – often at the expense of savings, overall financial security and even essential needs.

That is the picture emerging from Resume Now’s 2026 Cost-of-Living Crunch Report, a national survey of 1,011 employed Americans, which has found that only 17 percent of Americans feel financially secure enough to cover essentials and save money. Nearly two-thirds of respondents cited everyday essentials as their biggest financial burden. What’s more, a remarkable 92 percent said they have cut back on spending, including on items many would previously have considered non-negotiable.

Please notice that only “employed Americans” were asked about the cost of living.

More than 100 million U.S. adults are not working at all.

For those that do not regularly follow my work, yes that is an accurate number.  The vast majority of U.S. adults that are not working are considered to be “not in the labor force” by the federal government.

Another survey that was conducted at the end of December found that 70 percent of Americans consider the cost of living where they live to be “not very affordable” or “not affordable at all”…

American consumers aren’t feeling great about the economy or their own financial situation, with the phrase “affordability crisis” dominating headlines and political campaigns over the last few months.

The majority — 70% — of Americans surveyed in a Marist poll of over 1,400 adults taken in December, say that the cost of living in their area is not very affordable, or not affordable at all, for the average family.

This is the result of decades of incredibly bad economic policy.

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