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Deflation has kept a bid under the Yen for 20 years, since the huge load of bad debt denominated in that currency creates demand. The Japanese government took advantage of that bid and ridiculously low long-term rates and has issued unpayable quantities of debt, squandering the nation’s current and future wealth on government jobs and [...]

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This from CNBC.
Greece should consider selling some of its islands as one option to reduce debt, two members of the German parliament in Chancellor Angela Merkel’s centre-right coalition said.
Josef Schlarmann, a senior member of Merkel’s Christian Democrats, and Frank Schaeffler, a finance policy expert in the Free Democrats, were quoted on Thursday as saying that [...]

Taleb thinks hyperinflation is a strong enough possibility to justify way OTM bets on gold (long) and bonds (short). The one bit I agree with is the long gold / short stocks play (though I think gold is likely to fall with stocks, just not as much), and I suspect that deflationist Hendry would concur.
Hendry [...]

A friend just sent me a link to this excerpt of Michael Lewis’s new book, The Big Short. It’s the chapter about  Michael Burry, a California recluse who emersed himself in mortgage bond prospectuses, figured out that it was an historic bubble, and then convinced Goldman and other TBTF banks to write his value fund [...]

Thanks to Pej for finding this:

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Chanos relays a great quote from Milton Friedman: He was brought to watch the Chinese built a canal, and when he asked why they were using shovels and not bulldozers, he was told that machinery was being eschewed in order to create more jobs. Friedman replied with something like, “Oh, [...]

Charlie Munger is the other billionaire from Berkshire Hathaway, the one who has never pimped for Hillary Clinton and still retains a great deal of common sense. He’s written an essay for Slate.com on how the US has come to ruin:
In the early 1700s, Europeans discovered in the Pacific Ocean a large, unpopulated island with [...]

I glanced at the markets at 4:30 just in time to see every “risk” market spike down hard together. That kind of instant, coordinated movement only happens on announcements, usually something out of Washington. Turns out the Fed spooked traders with news of a 0.25% hike in the discount rate, the rate at which distressed [...]

I’ve always liked John Stossel, a reporter who started out doing exposés on businesses as a consumer reporter in New York (and was famously hit by a pro-wrestler during an interview in the ’80s), but gradually realized that the biggest scams of course use the force of government.
He worked for ABC for ages, but was recently [...]

Below I’ve posted the audio of a talk by economist and historian Murray Rothbard on America’s only two just wars, the American revolution and the war for southern independence.
Here is Rothbard’s definition of a just war, from an essay based on this talk:

My [...]