Rob Viglione at Seeking Alpha:
We can explain the rapid declines in homeowner wealth with the real estate bubble bursting in 2007, but how can we explain the general shifting in real estate capital structures going from 84% equity in 1945 to a mere 38% in 2010? Continue reading
Forbes on where richer than average households are moving within the USA, June 14, 2010:
No. 1: Collier County, Fla.
Arriving average income per capita: $76,161
Departing average income per capita: $26,128
Stationary household average income per capita: $49,959
Total arriving people: 15,150
Total departing people: 16,802
Top origin: Lee County, Fla. (2,987 people) Continue reading
Organizations and Markets has a brief bibliography of the evolution of accounting by the distinguished libertarian economic historian, Sudha Shenoy. Accounting emerged without state intervention as a type of Hayekian spontaneous order:
“Someone asked whether accounting conventions can be interpreted as a kind of “spontaneous order,” in Hayek’s sense, or if the standard rules are the result mainly of state intervention. Sudha replied with these reading suggestions (lightly edited by me): Continue reading
“The Obama Administration and senior BP officials are frantically working not to stop the world’s worst oil disaster, but to hide the true extent of the actual ecological catastrophe. Senior researchers tell us that the BP drilling hit one of the oil migration channels and that the leakage could continue for years unless decisive steps are undertaken, something that seems far from the present strategy.
In a recent discussion, Vladimir Kutcherov, Professor at the Royal Institute of Technology in Sweden and the Russian State University of Oil and Gas, predicted that the present oil spill flooding the Gulf Coast shores of the United States “could go on for years and years … many years.” [1]
According to Kutcherov, a leading specialist in the theory of abiogenic deep origin of petroleum, “What BP drilled into was what we call a ‘migration channel,’ a deep fault on which hydrocarbons generated in the depth of our planet migrate to the crust and are accumulated in rocks, something like Ghawar in Saudi Arabia.” [2] Ghawar, the world’s most prolific oilfield has been producing millions of barrels daily for almost 70 years with no end in sight. According to the abiotic science, Ghawar like all elephant and giant oil and gas deposits all over the world, is located on a migration channel similar to that in the oil-rich Gulf of Mexico. Continue reading
From Natural News.com (hat-tip to Unfiltered News Network):
“Our work shows that radiation can change the microenvironment of breast cells, and this in turn can allow the growth of abnormal cells with a long-lived phenotype that have a much greater potential to be cancerous,” Paul Yaswen, a cell biologist and breast cancer research specialist with Berkeley Lab’s Life Sciences Division, said in a statement to the press. Continue reading
While the government meddlers aim at the impossible (“stimulating the economy”) with the aid of the unethical (appropriating tax payer funds for their interventions), the much-maligned market is doing its best to sweeten the pain the only way it knows – providing new buyers at prices that turn the old buyers into sellers. Joel Bowman at The Daily Reckoning reports (June 12, 2010):
“For a growing number of well-to-do, geographically mobile Chinese citizens, property investments abroad are becoming a popular store of wealth, and a hedge against an increasingly precarious market back home. Continue reading
The New York Times (June 11, 2010) reports on the failure of a republican effort to block the EPA (environmental protection agency) in its efforts to regulate carbon emissions as a health hazard to humans
“Senate Republicans failed yesterday to halt the Obama administration’s plan to regulate greenhouse gases, engulfing the chamber in a sprawling daylong debate that bounced from climate skepticism to posters of dead birds smeared in oil. Continue reading
Cassandra Anderson at Freedom Advocates sounds the alert about the underhanded push for “sustainable development” – Agenda 21 – through ‘Cap and Trade”.
(By the way, we’re all for sustainable development as long as it’s voluntary and comes without the heavy hand of the kleptocracy. So too we’re all for caring for the environment, choosing your family size wisely, reusing resources, and cultivating modesty, restraint, and thrift as essential components of the supremely capitalist moral virtue of prudence. But we’re not for any of these things when they’re hustled through surreptitiously as part of an agenda of top-down control and expropriation of people’s wealth and work). Continue reading
From Rick Ackerman:
We all need to get on board with paying down debt like any responsible citizen debtor would do. We owe big-time and this is but a taste of how it may cost us:
- Major employment reductions amongst those working in the public service
- Health care services that are rationed. Fewer nurses, health practitioners and support staff Continue reading
Update:
The case gets stranger. Lorenzana was on a 2003 TV serial, giggling about breast implant surgery she’d had. Knowing that, would any lawyer have framed her case the way it was? Of course, this doesn’t mean she wasn’t the target of harassment. The surgery itself says nothing. It’s commonplace. Do men who take viagra or steroids lose their civil rights? No. And a competent corporate lawyer would, of course, make it the first order of business to establish that the plaintiff in a harassment suit was a slut and “asking for it.” That’s quite usual. But I remain suspicious why this story, like the Helen Thomas story, has suddenly become so prominent….Maybe to create a little sympathy for the banks? Take the focus off the Gaza flotilla? Continue reading