To whomever suggested; thanks I haven't read After the Crash since maybe Chapter 4?

Sorry for cluttering the board with prose; I enjoy the outlet.

SALAD SHOOTEEEEEER!

Sorry for cluttering the board with prose; I enjoy the outlet.

You're welcome, and no worries. It's late, I'm drinking heavily and I enjoyed the story

-whomever

The mass of swarming killer flies attacked the giant homosapeon horde! "Its worth another pass, its worth another pass, we can get them, they are weak!", exhorted the killerfly leader! "If we drain the blood of 90% of them; we will rule the planet! We just need to keep this up for 3 days!"

Over the distance, there was a rumbling; a noise; a crank; a start. The flies had never heard of the concept of "bug on a windshield"... nor were they aware similar attacks had been parried. The cars were on the march, down the mountainside, closer, 5km, closer, 3 km, closer... the horde was still standing and had called in the government-backed-GM/Chrsyler calvary! Oh, the killer-fly humanity... thousands of bugs, perishing on the windshield; to live not a day more; I can't stand to watch...

Unprose filter: No way in hell does the Comex get busted.

@resistance,

This has a whiff of conspiracy theory, but might be worth a read. Apparently, Duetche Bank nearly defaulted on Comex contracts at the end of March:

http://seekingalpha.com/article/129128-did-the-ecb-save-comex-from-gold-default

CR, what do you mean by little Hoovers?

Popeye. Duh. Thanks.

You out of the day trading gig?

Which is pure comedy given that the federal hoover debt issuance is crowding out state spending.

Comrade Coinz (homepage, profile) wrote on Mon, 6/29/2009 - 11:31 pm

nytol.

At least you're honest about it. I just can't see how the masters of the universe didn't rig this obvious escape route long ago. Again, the Hotel California business model.

Not One Cent

Hoover deficit-spent (ending the Coolidge surpluses).

Hoover's Deficit Spending | CEI 

FDR attacked Hoover's deficits in the 1932 campaign--but ultimately ran his own deficts (similar to Obama).

The Defining Moment: FDR's Hundred ... - Google Books 

~~~~~

FDR had to run deficits because he was facing deflation .... what he should have done was print Greenbacks ...

He could have then used these Greenbacks to fund social programs without debt or deficits ...

Creating more debt to solve debt does not work ... as we see today ...

Thisis compoundede by the fact that the money that is being created is being hoarded by the banks

and will be destroyed by losses.

The money has to reach the people and the banks have to be deemed solvent or it is all for naught ...

This has me thinking about local and state budgets as the entitlement bomb approaches detonation. It seems reasonable to me that states/ localities that have generous retirement programs are going to be deserted en masse when they have to jack up taxes to fund their liabilities. People will leave to less populated states with a smaller relative number of retirees on the books or to where benefits were less generous. I have no hard data on this but I assume that the Northeast and Rust Belt states would qualify as the former and Southern and Western states (x CA) as the latter. The Northeast, PA, OH, MI etc will become even bigger ghost towns while NM, AZ, TX, and the rest of the South may get a serious influx of people fleeing oppressive state income, sales, and and property taxes. Broke states will no doubt cry for Federal help and fed income taxes will climb in order to bail out the retirement funds of the withering states. Anyone agree or disagree?

"It seems reasonable to me that states/ localities that have generous retirement programs are going to be deserted en masse when they have to jack up taxes to fund their liabilities."

They'll declare BK first. Public unions in California are trying to place some restraints on BK for counties and cities, another hoop to jump through. If things get bad enough, good luck on that.

Inflationary sucking sound (HR Perot) =... Deflation

Who will take a stand? Where does this end?

Some demagogue. Hope for a time, then we'll think back on the oligarchs with fondness.

PBGC, I see the future and it's going to require a taxpayer funded bailout.

Once again - Irresponsibility pays!

[What is needed is for the Federal Government to step in and take over

health care, unemployment insurance and other social programs ]

Sure, LMAO!

They do such a wonderful job managing budgets and everything, what could go wrong ?

Externalized Costs (profile) wrote on Tue, 6/30/2009 - 12:02 am

We all know we could do more but we all bear witness as these crimes are perpetuated right in front of us. I am just as guilty. Where will true change and hope come from. Who will take a stand? Where does this end?

EC, this doesn't end. It just collapses. You can't solve a culture determined to get rich quick, and all at the same time. Resistance is futile on a collective level, but you still have some individual rights left for now. Tune in, turn on, drop out. Many folks like to talk a good game about liberty and personal responsibility... now it's time to cash that check I guess. "Going Galt" won't work, and suicide is sort of self-defeating of your purpose in claiming there is a better way of life than conspicuous consumer capitalism and universalized selfishness. TPTB are already beholden to the system or outright players of the great game themselves, bought and paid for directly or indirectly. The threat of starvation is the engine that runs this psychopathic system which has evolved to ruthlessly and efficiently exploit human behavior. Eventually it eats itself when there is nothing else left. Could be awhile though.

bearly

[What is needed is for the Federal Government to step in and take over

health care, unemployment insurance and other social programs ]

Sure, LMAO!

They do such a wonderful job managing budgets and everything, what could go wrong ?

~~~~~

Medicare works .... at a fraction of what the private sector costs ...

TJ and The Bear

IMHO California's almost at the point where more taxes of any kind will result in less revenue.

Sort of like the "Minsky Moment" we reached in the broader economy wherein new debt no longer creates an equivalent or greater amount of new wealth.

~~~~

I agree with you. I think other states are to follow. That is why we need Federal Intervention ...

Welcome to Dragnipur.

TJ and The Bear

Medicare works .... at a fraction of what the private sector costs ...

BS. Medicare charges a fraction of what medicine really costs and shifts the rest onto the private sector, hence the ENTIRELY FICTIONAL savings.

~~~~

Hogwash ...

Administrative costs at Medicare are 3% vs 15% in private companies ...

Medicare has no advertising costs ...

Medicare takes no profit ...

Medicare can't bargain for drugs

Even if costs are partially shifted they don't account for the huge disparities ...

Draconus: 'He (Anomander Rake) is too merciful, too merciful to wield Dragnipur. The situation is growing desperate...Dragnipur needs to feed...There are those who, at long last, fail in pulling this burden. They are carried to the wagon, then, and tossed onto it – you think this preferable? Too weak to move, they are soon buried by those like them. Buried, trapped for eternity. And the more the wagon bears, the greater its weight – the more difficult the burden for those of us still able to heave on these chains. Do you understand? Dragnipur needs to feed. We require . . . fresh legs.'

So if we were in the UK - this would suck like a Hoover, right?

Scrooge McDuck (profile) wrote on Tue, 6/30/2009 - 12:26 am

Why not? If enough entrepreneurs/business owners decide it's too much work to be taxed that much (like England at 50%), and close the business and lay off workers, that would trigger unemployment much faster and crash the system.

I meant the whole utopian life awaits .. come with us to the moon... sense of "Galt's gulch", sorry for the confusion. There's no where, physically, to go. And no way to entirely avoid association with the system, just opportunities to orient one's life so as to minimize its impact and one's required involvement with it, and to pick up the mess left behind and help those struggling via private efforts since the safety net is broken, gone, or gamed to uselessness.

We need restructuring ...

Agreed, we just don't need the crooks in DC in charge of it.

"Medicare doesn't pay anything close to full costs, and the fraud nearly covers the distance between the respective administrative costs.'

~~~~

Over the years Medicare has been restricted and gamed ...

Single Payer HR 676 would create a simple system free from most of the pit falls Medicare has been

subjected to by DC ...

Believe what you will, mmckinl, but I have over a dozen years working with benefit & claims management systems and another half-dozen developing & marketing my own diagnostic software. Medicare doesn't pay anything close to full costs, and the fraud nearly covers the distance between the respective administrative costs.

Why would I listen to you, TJ? You are obviously just part of the system, and therefore part of the problem, especially since you refuse to let me believe that my skittle-farting pony is right around the corner. Hater.

TJ and The Bear ... MLM

Single Payer is not fantasy .... every other G7 country has it and they pay half as much and get better outcomes...

What you deny is your own right to health care ... and other's rights as well ...

MLM,

Damn, you got me.

squidward,

mmckinl's figures suggest a 12% difference; go here  and find the estimated fraud running roughly 10%.

Dumb national debt question:

There's a widely quoted CBO report which is paraphrased in part:
" If current policies are continued, CBO projects the debt will rise to 100 percent by the early 2020s,"
(See Mish for example)

Isn't the debt already very close to 100% of GDP?
Debt: 11.3T United States public debt - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia 
GDP: 14.2T List of countries by GDP (nominal) - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia 

The wiki article on debt notes:
"As of June 2009 the debt was 82.5 percent of GDP based on current GDP.... The President's 2010 budget estimates that total debt relative to GDP will rise to 97% by 2010 and stabilize at approximately 100% thereafter."

Why does the CBO say 100% in 2020 and why would that be shocking? 100% by 2020 might be "shockingly" low and late.
What gives?

mmckinl (and anyone else who wants to jump in),

It's been mentioned numerous times that the doctors here make x times more money than those elsewhere. Of course, doctors here also have to spend x times more money on their educations, too. Sooo...

1) How do we cut costs without cutting doctor's salaries?
2) How do we cut doctor's salaries without cutting the cost of their education?
3) How do we cut doctor's educational costs without cutting that for all other majors?
4) How do we cut all educational costs and expect to even have higher education?
5) How do we attract talent to an area wherein there's no money to be made, only inhuman amounts of work?

Like I've stated before, healthcare does not exist in a vacuum. You can't just take a foreign plan and plug it in here without affecting everything else, and I don't see anyone addressing these questions.

Just because their healthcare system works for the political and economic system doesn't mean it'll work for ours, and what's the point of being America if we toss out our entire system for theirs???

mmckinl,

BTW, I really do appreciate these "conversations" -- maybe someday one of us will convince the other of something, but until then we keep civilly advancing the debate and maybe learning things we didn't know.

To apply European health system to USA:

1. Slash health spending by 60% (Dutch levels)
2. Add 50 million consumers (US uninsured estimate, supposedly indicating lack of health care)
3. Multiply health problems per person (fatter Americans, etc.)

All you have to do is satisfy 17% more people and x% more illnesses with only 40% of current spending.

Divide vastly more demand by a vastly smaller pie of spending.

I am not sure if today's Americans will take kindly to that.

TJ - I read the whole page & did not see the word fraud. Anyway, that page hardly seems authoritative.

5) How do we attract talent to an area wherein there's no money to be made, only inhuman amounts of work?

TJ, this doesn't match your premise: doctors here make x times more money than those elsewhere.
Therefore they are making money elsewhere, therefore there is money to be made (under alternate systems)

Geez, squidward, you need to get your eyes checked.

Look at the fourth figure down the left for the estimated fraud. Then look at the section section (Largest Budget Items) third figure over.

On, and regarding "authoritative", hit the "about" button at the bottom and read that page.

Geez, squidward, you need to get your eyes checked.
Look at the fourth figure down the left for the estimated fraud.
Thanks! I didn't see that.

OK, I read the about page, but still don't know how they know how much fraud there is.
They say "complex formulas and multiple sources." Gee whiz. Now I'm convinced.

'course maybe I can't see or read it straight Entirely possible.

The way I read it, seems to imply: don't learn from others. But I don't think that's what you mean.

Obviously not. What I'm saying is that you can't transplant a Lotus Elise engine into a Viper and still have a good sportscar, because the surrounding systems are setup entirely different. There's all manner of unintended consequences lurking out there. Could be certain approaches to healthcare will only work in an entirely different politico-economic system incompatible with those things that have made America the dynamic powerhouse of the 20th century... or not.

Here there are waiting lists at med schools.

"South Africa's health minister Barbara Hogan says a woman has died in childbirth because of a strike by public health doctors at 26 hospitals, which is entering its third week. She now has asked the military to send doctors to help out in the crisis."

Doctors' strike at 26 South African hospitals enters third week

You can't even correctly spell gobbledygook!!! No, you haven't even come close, and HR 676 is a bigger pipe dream than the California high-speed rail line.

Oh well... off to bed. Night all.

I've little hope.
.
"It must be considered that there is nothing more difficult to carry out nor more doubtful of success nor more dangerous to handle than to initiate a new order of things; for the reformer has enemies in all those who profit by the old order, and only lukewarm defenders in all those who would profit by the new order; this lukewarmness arising partly from the incredulity of mankind who does not truly believe in anything new until they actually have experience of it."
.
Reform is almost always dead. But it's fun to imagine.

California has no budget.

Yet my friend a public high school teacher in santa clara county is somehow making $50 an hour this summer to teach summer school.

Granted he only has 26 more years until he can collect his 60% pension. But the feeling of job security caused him to buya 1200 sq. foot condo in summer of 2007 for the bargain price of $560k , which is is already underwater on after putting up $160k in cash (most of it his parents).

He does seem very happy though. And he's not on drugs! I wonder what happens after CA doesnt pass a real budget . Will the IOUs start flowing en masse?

Instead of expensively educated overpaid self anointed geniuses running private secretive practices that obfuscate their prices, how about we just have average ongoing health maintenance provided by average people for everyone. The current tab for the financial crisis is $47,000 for each US citizen. That was more than enough money.

It makes no sense to have overqualified self entitled death merchant doctors performing desperate procedures on catastrophic health failures that could be avoided by routine health maintenance.

The medical community is harvesting poor health instead of fostering good health. On top of that they value life on a sliding scale of income. There is no defense for these shortcomings. There is only Denial.

Shame on them.

Give $1 million a year to a million doctors and tell them they have to treat everyone who walks in the door for forty hours a week: only costs $1 trillion.

Then train students that will work happily for a third.

Then downsize the rotten princes and princesses of self interest and ship them to Burma.

We have the money and the technology to heal the sick and create a healthier, more productive nation. This would lead to a happier, kinder, and more stable nation.

There are all kinds of choices we can make.

We can even chose to do nothing and let ever increasing numbers of people die in the streets and see how far it can go before there is blowback. We can let medical related bankruptcies rise from the current 50% of all bankruptcies and see what happens.

50% of hospitals are losing money:

"Two new analyses show that the "economic decline is continuing to ravage the nation's hospitals, with half of them operating in the red, and many planning service and staffing cuts." The Times explained that "hospitals are ailing because of a number of problems hitting in close succession." The problems include "investment incomes" plummeting, while more people "put off elective procedures and insurers" tighten "their grip on the length of hospital stays they cover." According to the new data, "an unprecedented 50 percent of the nation's hospitals appear to be losing money." The bottom 25 percent of hospitals "posted margins below minus seven percent"

Running a hospital: Update on the economy and its effect on BIDMC

Hold in that denial while huffing the final fumes from an empty can of credit.

Everything is fine.

Mish wrote the following:
8) Bernanke could not spot the housing bubble. Amazingly Bernanke thought the housing bubble was "well contained" right before it exploded in his face. Of course there is another possibility: Bernanke is a liar and knew it was not contained but did not want to say so.
{IMO this man sounds like a lunatic... and if not for Sullivan v. NY Times '64, would possibly get his pants sued off}
...
again, using my WW1 'technology outstripping strategy' analogy perhaps they couldn't see it, perhaps it too abstracted out and they didn't
have the tools to analyze it properly. look at the Vietnam War for example, there were many things they couldn't see in DC that were pivotal
in the success or failure of that war... didn't help that McNamara 'massaged' the field reporting to his liking or that Westy thought he was going to
have over a million boots on the ground or that McBundy's (considered to be one of the most intelligent men ever to work in DC) critical assessments
of the war effort were so flawed or that LBJ's character flaws magnified and distorted the effort from the get go...
How many people were out there in the field from the FED? Was anyone brokering houses? Or involved in structured finance at an I-bank?
Or even weighing in on the US gov.'s policy from '47 onward to make the US a nation of home owners, i.e., the mortgage interest write-off is a middle class
entitlement. (63% of the Swiss are renters)

this thread is partly an asinine load of drivel, central planning Stalinist concepts, state controlled hooey, fantasy concept monetary systems, and single payer gibberish put forth by a series of mental midgets incapable of stringing together a box of paper clips

other than that, it's a most erudite and enjoyable read

Hollywood Hack,
you would choose a series of battles that were so incredibly wrong headed from start to finish, I'm not sure there was ever a moment when
what they were doing was right... should have listened to Bismarck on that particular region of the world about it not being worth the life of
a single Pomeranian soldier, but the British had been obsessed with that region for nearly 50 years and that is what sadly drove this misguided effort

edited out...
...
many years ago I had a roommate who was doing his residency in neuro-surgery at Columbia Presby in NYC,
he had like one day off every 10 days or so... I knew his ex-wife (she grew tired of never seeing him) and she hooked us up. Even when he was at home he'd be studying tomes of brain pictures sliced and diced to your heart's content. Once in a great while
he would hold a poker game with fellow docs and I'd be invited. I won most very time, they were losy poker players. But from the conversations that went on it was obvious that many were in it for the money, the profession that is. (car of choice was a Mercedes)
He went on to become one of the top 10 neurosurgeons in the USA. Once performed an operation where he and a team of other docs put this man on ice (around 62 F), drained his blood, stopped his heart and performed the surgery in about 52 minutes and replaced the blood, warmed him up and restarted the heart and amazingly it worked. I ran into another neurosurgeon a few years ago and mentioned this doc's name. Told me that he told my former roomie at a convention that that operation was sheer luck and that the next 10 attempts would result in 9 failures if not 10. To my knowledge he has never attempted it again.

Thread is a bit disjointed...

It's not however the little hoovers that will trigger as much pain as the big hoovers...CA, NY.

And this is just the first of many budget shortfalls 2010-201(?).

The little hoovers will matter when they begin absorbing the 1 out of 10 citizens known as Californian's...then it will be interesting.

--bh

California raised sales taxes and saw an immediate acceleration in declining revenues. California has been slowly bleeding the productive classes for decades and didn't realize it.

I imagine we'll see a lot of fiscal experimentation played out here over the next five years. Thank goodness there are still (barely) 60-Senators in Congress able to stop the madness.

NervousRex (profile) wrote on Tue, 6/30/2009 - 4:03 am

And, apparently, uncorrelated causation.

What degree of independence of the variable and result does your analysis yield? Or is California also the land of wag econometrics?

As a perspective on California's problems imagine New England, New York and Pennsylvania combined into one State and Buffalo is the capitol.

As a perspective on California's problems imagine...

Excellent comparison, Dawg.
I don't care about New England, New York or Pennsylvania, either.

broward (homepage, profile) wrote on Tue, 6/30/2009 - 4:21 am

Excellent comparison, Dawg.
I don't care about New England, New York or Pennsylvania, either.

LOL. Don't bogart that joint my friend...

BTW, the "Federalize Police" is pure internet myth. I'm sure everyone realizes that deep down but it is fun to speculate. Personally I see TPTB as so bereft of ideas at this point they are liable to grasp at anything. California is such a minfield of be careful what you wish for that no one is prepared to act. Paralysis of anticipation.

"As a perspective on California's problems imagine New England, New York and Pennsylvania combined into one State and Buffalo is the capitol."

You may have missed what a clown show they are currently running in Albany. Doing their best to demonstrate what a joke state government has become.

....at least in our state (NV) it's pretty cut and dried (and tiny when compared to our BIG Brother to the West):

Our Governor won't raise taxes. Special Session called, "Legislators, make the cuts necessary". Have fun, Seeya!

Lots of good forecasters of home price trends here.

Today, you can put your money where your mouth is...

ETFs Tracking Home Prices Set To Launch

MacroMarkets has received final approval to launch its long-awaited and oft-delayed home price securities on June 30.

As a result, its sponsor says it's planning for shares of the MacroShares Major Metro Up (UMM) and the MacroShares Major Metro Down (DMM) to start trading Tuesday on the New York Stock Exchange.

The funds are designed to deliver 300% and -300% of the return of the S&P/Case-Shiller Home Price 10 Index, the leading benchmark of residential home prices in the U.S. They will be the first products that allow investors to speculate on the direction of residential home prices.

ETFs Tracking Home Prices Set To Launch - News In Focus

"federalize the police", "trilaterialist commission controlling a 'new world order', "cancel or postpone American elections", " "confiscate all guns", "terrorist sleeper cells throughout America", "Obama is a Muslim", etc., ad nauseam

All right wing conspiracies to keep the American public scared of anything they don't understand...just bunk...

The real solution to our health-care problem is to look at it scientifically, and start studying outcomes -- then allocate resources to maximize the best outcomes.

Amen! And you are, sadly, exactly right about why these will never go anywhere.

I think the public will continue to fear "rationing", failing to recognize they're being rationed every time they have to contact their insurer/HMO to get cleared for a procedure...I'll pretend the nurses that make those decisions are good-faith health care professionals, but if that's not a "bureaucrat deciding your health care" I don't know what is. At least, they will continue to do this until the choice is no care under the "private" system or a public system.

Specialists in particular will fight to keep their fee-for-service model - and continue to engage in "churning" - at the expense of GPs - until either the "medical community" becomes too politically fractured to maintain the status quo, or there simply are no longer enough patients with money to buy their services. I suspect the latter. They won't give up until they've milked the system dry.

Mayo, Kaiser and others are working examples of systems set up around outcomes and a better long-term incentive structure. We have working models, they just don't suit the ends of those who want to make a quick buck, which, as CCB notes, is a lot of doctors.

bsr
maybe they need someone to read to them. and the thing is, i think they are like little girls just love to be scared.

It'll be fine now, right?

Yes, it's all fixed.
It was all just a big right-wing conspiracy.

You ever notice how there's never any "left-wing conspiracies"?

"I want to know why ammunition is still in such short supply"

......Dunno - Ask China - They manufacture all of it.

why ammunition is still in such short supply 8 months after the first shortages appeared

Oh, Gawd, not another conspiracy?!

I thought about posting it a few days ago but didn't want to hunt it back down. One of the major sports chains was running numerous "gun specialist" job positions for each of their stores. My guess is that they'd been running overtime hours in expectations of a die-down but it hasn't happened. In point of fact, I know two people who bought their first firearms last month.

Black Star Ranch (profile) wrote on Tue, 6/30/2009 - 5:02 am

......Dunno - Ask China - They manufacture all of it.

Oh. They're saving it for the liberation of Formosa.

...the only ammo not scarce seems to be .22 and shotgun ammo.

These folks have some ammo for sale, but not all types are currently in stock.
Cheaper Than Dirt - America's Ultimate Shooting Sports Discounter

The best conspiracies are the vast ones. Looks like the UK is tanking nicely. Guess that combination of dubious finance, complacency and condescension wasn't a winner after all.

U.K. First-Quarter GDP Drops 2.4%, Most Since 1958 (Update3) - Bloomberg.com

Wonder if castles are cheap yet.

C

the cost - it has gone THRU the roof!

Carbon tax, dude.
No problemo..

Seriously, I have no idea why ammo is scarce. I'm not worried because we are nowhere near far enough down the path that leads to substantial restrictions.

CR........lets talk about light bulbs and the effectiveness of top-down discussion groups of one on same.

bsr
what?

@Dawg - the gun crowd is hording...plain and simple. They are afraid Obama will send the Black Helicopters with UN insignia any minute now, to grab their guns. Gun control is a dead letter in the Democratic Party, whether or not they'd "secretly like" to grab people's guns. The NRA has worked hand in hand with the GOP for years to whip up a paranoid fervor, however, and so the folks are cranked up. I suspect that along about next summer it'll dawn on people that they have just piles of it sitting around and they'll stop buying, and the manufacturers will catch up again.

........when this President gets people to moving, they tend to move - regardless of the thought-process or thinking behind it. THAT's the scary part.

+10 from the Queen (drag, maybe...) City

Comrade Scott (profile) wrote on Tue, 6/30/2009 - 8:23 am

* reply
* Ignore user

@Dawg - the gun crowd is hording...plain and simple. They are afraid Obama will send the Black Helicopters with UN insignia any minute now, to grab their guns. Gun control is a dead letter in the Democratic Party, whether or not they'd "secretly like" to grab people's guns. The NRA has worked hand in hand with the GOP for years to whip up a paranoid fervor, however, and so the folks are cranked up. I suspect that along about next summer it'll dawn on people that they have just piles of it sitting around and they'll stop buying, and the manufacturers will catch up again.

Talk about Naive...boy do you have a delusional outlook on things....good luck to you there Shirley temple.... Next summer you will be lucky to even be eating at this rate.

But you seem of the " it cant happen here crowd " ...so I'll leave it at that.

......reminds me of the "wood cutting board" scare decades ago. Boards of Health across the US made restaurants and food purveyors change out all their wood cutting surfaces for plastic - because it was "safer". Turns out it WASN'T, ISN'T, was based on junk science (like this global change Cap & Trade nightmare), and finally eventually determined totally incorrect - plastic was more unsanitary than wood.

Only now able to get hold of some bulk ammunition. For a while, even generic 147g 9mm solids were impossible to find around here. Depends on what you get, but across different rounds, it's been a 40 - 75% price increase.

I've put away probably 50K rounds of rimfire at this point.

JD, the 1912 book "Fiat Money Inflation in France" is just wonderful on this subject.

Scribd

It has the sort of nuts-and-bolts detail that appeals to me.

I think it's a major counterexample to Mish's thesis that hyperinflation has never occurred in conjunction with falling real estate prices. Perhaps this case is unique, insofar as insiders got word that church lands were about to be seized and dumped their landholdings.

Panic of 1873 might have more rhymes, though.

Noise Alert:
Be careful if you're driving through South Carolina.
Don't want any of the fine folks here at CR getting a $300 ticket for this crap.
Drivers Warned About "Move Over" Law | wltx.com

"There are never any left-wing dictators either."

.......What then is Chavez?

rob dawg writes: " They're saving it for the liberation of Formosa."

they're not gonna need it, it'll be a paper transaction

part of resolution of their disappearing paper 'wealth'

only part

ot noise warning
ga move over fine is 500.

i'd be careful in ga too especially on 75 where they are always working.

Rob Dawg

Rich,
Do you really want to gamble on the trend direction of an index that is severely influenced by things like subsidies that may go away or tax policies that are in the hands of California's Legislature? I'd rather invest in the bookie, MacroShares.

I wouldn't touch these new ETFs with a 10-foot pole. I just wanted to let everybody know they are being born today.

BREAKING

U.S. April Case-Shiller home prices down 0.6%

volker the viking (profile) wrote on Tue, 6/30/2009 - 6:06 am

rob dawg: I should never doubt you

Trust but verify. Just like the Case-Shiller numbers. Something doesn't look right. I'm going to have to dig deeper after the pig.

About 1982, I was in Australia for a few months and bought a beater car and drove from Melbourne to Sydney a few times on the Hume Hwy, the main road. One time I decided to take the back road way, and was driving along, when all of the sudden the pavement stopped, and I was a couple of car lengths behind the car in front of me, when a rock from the dirt road shattered my windscreen. It was about a kilometer drive (my head kinda popped out of the side-window so I could see) to the nearest town of about 1,000 people. As I pulled into town, I counted around 20 windscreen stores.

Forgot the name of the town, but I imagined that schoolchildren would go on field trips to salt the road with just the right-sized rocks.

A variation of 'move-over', the broken-window variant.

U.K. Economy Posts Largest Decline in 50 Years

U.K. Economy Posts Largest Decline in 50 Years - WSJ.com

http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_8rpY5fQK-UQ/SkoCHgpXNlI/AAAAAAAAHMA/gjBHYM7dzn4/s1600-h/ukgdp.png

HomeGnome (profile) wrote on Tue, 6/30/2009 - 6:16 am
"Move Over" for revenue generation.
Can't wait to see all the petty little 'offenses' that people start getting ticketed for.

I hope so, cause frankly I'm tired of getting ticketed for felonies.
< just kidding! >

Case-Shiller: House Prices Fall in April

@shill But you seem of the " it cant happen here crowd " ...so I'll leave it at that.

No, I am of the "I fill my own loads" crowd...but keep trying with the ad-hominem...I'll take it as a concession that you can't/won't engage on the merits. Add to my earlier points that dealers have been quite saavy about this "shortage" and are making hay while the sun shines.

I can't wait for a few of the dumber NRA types to show up..you do realize some of us "socialists" and other-wise panty-wearing liberals are also armed, right? If not, that's gonna be a big surprise. I loves me some Sinclair Lewis too by the way, and that book was quite apropos of what we endured during the previous two terms. As Lewis said, "Fascism will arrive wrapped in the flag and carrying the cross".

Let me spell it out in very specific language:

Communism ∈ Authoritarianism
Fascism ∈ Authoritarianism

Authoritarianism !-> Fascism
Authoritarianism !-> Communism

Authoritarians like police states and like to disarm the populace. We do not have an Authoritarian government, no where even close. The token gun control legislation that was the "Assault Weapons Ban" was a joke, easily circumvented, as many pointed out in criticizing it's flaws.

Obama probably does like gun control, but he and the the Democrats in Congress - and Pelosi has said as much overtly - are not interested in that issue. Coburn thought he was gonna score some cheap points and hang up a budget bill he didn't like, and suddenly found his cute little amendment rolled right through. That dog (gun control bogeyman) won't hunt. If there really is either a permanent increased demand, or a constriction of output by the current manufacturers, then you'll see someone else enter into production.

trader walt, Yeah, bunk just like global warming and free range vegetables. The real bunk comes from the american academy berzerkley types.

lama, be careful, the moveon.org types are very tolerant of different views as long as you agree with them. s/