EthanAllen's blog

This aritlce is by Marc Estrin. It questions how to proceed in the 9/11 Truth movement given the myth that has covered the collective consciousness of Americans. Maybe we can create our own myth with the millions around the world who try to do the same.  See www.9-11cc.org for the next wave.  JH

THINGS THAT THREATEN OUR HUMAN WORLDS.

MONDAY, SEPTEMBER 5, 2011 NIEBELUNGENLIED 911

In a continuing email exchange about the future strategy of any kind of 9/11 truth movement, Charles Simpson alerts us to diverging uses of the idea of "myth" in an important on-line talk by David Ray Griffin. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BXw3jJ3021o

Simpson notices that on the one hand, Griffin characterizes the official story as being intentionally raised -- by government and media -- to "mythic status", "mythic in the sense of an organizing narrative that defines collective identity, purpose and legitimacy." Such myth, both Simpson and Griffin observe, is not to be measured or refuted by empirical data, and is thus secure against any suggested investigation.

He criticizes Griffin for shifting ground from the "organizing narrative" definition of myth to a more trivial and colloquial one in which myth becomes simply "an empirically false account of events," and then proceeding in his lecture to disprove the official assertions with empirical data.

Consequently Simpson -- unlike Griffin -- concludes that the 9/11 truth movement should avoid its own version of scholasticism, "a too-narrow preoccupation with our own set of 9/11 facts", "a focus on forensic details" that "draws us in a cult-like direction away from others" -- since such details, such fact-checking, does not make sense or speak to a rhetorical/psychological public world beyond empirical analysis.

It seems to me that neither Simpson nor Griffin -- at least here -- have seized on the most important function of myth: not to hide, not to falsify, but to reveal. Any deep study of folk tales and parables show them to illuminate patterns so deeply built into experience as to be otherwise invisible.

Alberich wants to steal the gold from the bottom of the Rhine, and so do Cheney and Rubin and Obama and Geitner and Summers and...all of them, and the institutions behind them. But Wagner'sRing shows us much more than that people, politicians, and banks are greedy. In the 15-hour telling of the myth we come to perceive a web of interactions, the forswearing of love, the need to self-destruct, the relation of generations and lovers, bosses and slaves, the many questions raised by heroism... and much else. That is the difference between mere narrative and myth.

Seeing into myth involves audience awareness. Little children believe in the myth of Santa Claus, and then as bigger children, decide that the myth isn't true. But what do wiser adults make of myths, fairy- and folktales, biblical and other parables? They understand that these ancient story collections are not only not trivial, but are essential to a deeper understanding of the human and natural world. The dimensions of myth have to probed by those who understand it. That, it seems to me, is the function of the 9/11 truth movement -- not to move out beyond the "single-issue politics" of 9/11, but to responsibly explore the myth of it.

What does the 9/11 story collection, and the reactions to it, tell us about society and government, about science and Faustian striving, about individual and social psychology, about greed, love, fear, and heroism? The 9/11 mythos easily becomes a simultaneous focusing and broadening lens to see into these opacities.

But first we must understand these dimensions ourselves, master the empirical data and the rhetorical approaches, see ourselves as teachers of this story in its broadest and deepest context at levels appropriate to any given audience. Sometimes one can use empirical evidence to open well-guarded doors. Sometimes one has to start by discussing things at more personal or philosophical levels.

Right now the characters in our opera are predominantly the Alberichs of press and power, and a large population of in-the-darkness Niebelungen slaves, toiling underground and in the killing fields to fashion wealth for their dictators. By and large, Americans seem to believe much of what they're told about 9/11. Some largish percentage have been polled as not quite believing it -- but not enough to do anything other than become more cynical.

Our role is to move the Niebelungen above ground at least, cognizant of the possibilities and deeper meanings of this never-ending, no-limits story -- precisely by exploring the myth as myth, and bringing the underworlds into focus.

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Where's the Money? Where are the jobs? The Silent Liquidity Squeeze.

Ellen Brown  July 13, 2011

http://WebofDebt.com/articles

Where did all the jobs go?  Small and medium-sized businesses are the major source of new job creation, and they are not hiring; while startup businesses, which contribute a fifth of the nation’s new jobs, often can’t get off the ground.  Why not?  

In a June 30 article in the Wall Street Journal titled “Smaller Businesses Seeking Loans Still Come Up Empty,” Emily Maltby reported that business owners rank access to capital as the most important issue facing them today; and only 17% of smaller businesses said they were able to land needed bank financing.  Businesses have to pay for workers and materials before they can get paid for the products they produce, and for that they need bank credit.  But they are reporting that their credit lines are being cut. 

Instead of credit lines, they are being pushed into credit card accounts that average 16 percent interest, more than double the rate of the average business loan.  It is one of many changes in banking trends that have been very lucrative for Wall Street banks but are killing local businesses. 

The Travesty of the $1.6 Trillion in “Excess Reserves”

The bank bailout and the Federal Reserve’s two “quantitative easing” programs were supposed to preserve local lending, but  the trillions of dollars thrown at Wall Street through these programs have succeeded only in producing mountains of “excess reserves” that are now sitting idle in Federal Reserve bank accounts.  Since the banking crisis following the collapse of Lehman Brothers on September 15, 2008, a stunning $1.6 trillion in excess reserves has accumulated in bank reserve accounts.  

The justification for TARP -- the Trouble Asset Relief Program that subsidized the nation’s largest banks after the Lehman collapse -- was that it was necessary to unfreeze credit markets.  The contention was that banks were refusing to lend to each other, cutting them off from the liquidity that was essential to the lending business.  But an MIT study reported in September 2010 showed that immediately after the Lehman collapse, the interbank lending markets were actually working.  They froze, not when Lehman died, but when the Fed started paying interest on excess reserves in October 2008.  As the MIT study was summarized in The Daily Bail:

. . . [T]he NY Fed's own data show that interbank lending during the period from September to November did not "freeze," collapse, melt down or anything else.  In fact, every single day throughout this period, hundreds of billions were borrowed and paid back.  The decline in daily interbank lending came only when the Fed ballooned its balance sheet and started paying interest on excess reserves.  

The Fed began paying interest on bank reserves on October 9, 2008 -- not just on required reserves (amounting to 10% of deposits for larger banks) but on “excess” reserves.  Reserve balances immediately shot up; and they have been going up almost vertically ever since.  

By March 2011, interbank loans outstanding were only one-third their level in May 2008, before the crisis hit. And on June 29, 2011, the Fed reported excess reserves of nearly $1.57 trillion – 20 times what the banks needed to satisfy their reserve requirements.    

Bruce Bartlett, writing in the Fiscal Times in July 2010, observed:

Economists are divided on why banks are not lending, but increasingly are focusing on a Fed policy of paying interest on reserves — a policy that began, interestingly enough, on October 9, 2008, at almost exactly the moment when the financial crisis became acute. . . .

Historically, the Fed paid banks nothing on required reserves. This was like a tax equivalent to the interest rate banks could have earned if they had been allowed to lend such funds. But in 2006, the Fed requested permission to pay interest on reserves because it believes that it would help control the money supply should inflation reappear.  

. . . [M]any economists believe that the Fed has unwittingly encouraged banks to sit on their cash and not lend it by paying interest on reserves. 

Why Pay Interest on Reserves?

Why the Fed decided to pay interest on reserves is a complicated question, but it was evidently a desperate attempt to keep control of “monetary policy.”  The Fed theoretically controls the money supply by controlling the Fed funds rate.  This hasn’t worked very well in practice, but neither has anything else, and the Fed is apparently determined to hang onto this last arrow in its quiver.    

In an effort to salvage a comatose credit market after the Lehman collapse, the Fed set the target rate for Fed funds – the funds that banks borrow from each other -- at an extremely low 0.25%.  Paying interest on reserves at the same rate was intended to ensure that the Fed funds rate did not fall below the target.  The reasoning was that banks would not lend their reserves to other banks for less, since they could get a guaranteed 0.25% from the Fed.  The medicine worked, but it had the adverse side effect of killing the Fed funds market, on which local lenders rely for their liquidity needs.  

In the traditional banking model, banks collected deposits from their own customers and stored them for their own liquidity needs, using them to back loans and clear outgoing checks.  But today banks typically “buy” liquidity, either from other banks or from the money market, the commercial paper market, etc.  The Fed’s payment of interest on reserves competes with all of these markets for ready-access short-term funds, creating a liquidity crunch.

As Warren Mosler points out, bank regulators have made matters worse by setting limits on the amount of “wholesale” funding small banks can do.  That means they are limited in the amount of liquidity they can “buy” (e.g. in the form of CDs).   

It has been argued that banks do not need to buy or borrow funds from each other, since they are now awash in reserves; but these reserves are not equally distributed.  The 25 largest U.S. banks account for over half of aggregate reserves, with 21% of reserves held by just 3 banks.  

As noted in an earlier article, the QE2 funds all went to the purchase of government securities from the 20 banks that are the Fed’s “primary dealers” at auction, and foreign banks with U.S. branches wound up with the funds. John Mason, Professor of Finance at Penn State University and a former senior economist at the Federal Reserve, observed in a June 27 blog: 

Cash assets at the smaller [U.S.] banks remained relatively flat . . . . Thus, the reserves the Fed was pumping into the banking system were not going into the smaller banks. . . .  

[B]usiness loans continue to “tank” at the smaller banking institutions. . . . 

The real lending by commercial banks is not taking place in the United States. The lending is taking place off-shore, underwritten by the Federal Reserve System and this is doing little or nothing to help the American economy grow. 

Why Business Credit Lines Are Being Cut

Without access to the interbank lending market, banks will not extend business credit lines.  The reason was explained by economist Ronald McKinnon in a Wall Street Journal article in May: 

Banks with good retail lending opportunities typically lend by opening credit lines to nonbank customers. But these credit lines are open-ended in the sense that the commercial borrower can choose when—and by how much—he will actually draw on his credit line. This creates uncertainty for the bank in not knowing what its future cash positions will be. An illiquid bank could be in trouble if its customers simultaneously decided to draw down their credit lines.

If the retail bank has easy access to the wholesale interbank market, its liquidity is much improved. To cover unexpected liquidity shortfalls, it can borrow from banks with excess reserves with little or no credit checks. But if the prevailing interbank lending rate is close to zero (as it is now), then large banks with surplus reserves become loath to part with them for a derisory yield. And smaller banks, which collectively are the biggest lenders to SMEs [small and medium-sized enterprises], cannot easily bid for funds at an interest rate significantly above the prevailing interbank rate without inadvertently signaling that they might be in trouble. Indeed, counterparty risk in smaller banks remains substantial as almost 50 have failed so far this year.

The local banks could turn to the Fed’s discount window for loans, but that too could signal that the banks were in trouble; and for weak banks, the Fed’s discount window may be closed.  Further, the discount rate is triple the Fed funds rate.  

Finding Alternatives to a Failed Banking Model

By inhibiting interbank lending, the Fed’s payment of interest on reserves appears to be creating a silent “liquidity squeeze” -- the same sort of thing that brought on the banking crisis of September 2008.  According to Jeff Hummel, associate professor of economics at San Jose State University, it could happen again.  Paying interest on reserves, he warns, “may eventually rank with the Fed's doubling of reserve requirements in the 1930s and bringing on the recession of 1937 within the midst of the Great Depression.”  

Paying interest on reserves was intended to prevent “inflation,” but it is having the opposite effect.  The whole economic model is wrong.  The fear of price inflation has prevented governments from using their sovereign power to create money and credit to serve the needs of their national economies.  Instead, they must cater to the interests of a private banking industry that profits from its monopoly power over those essential economic tools.  

Whether by accident or design, the federal government and Federal Reserve have not yet got their policies right. While we wait for them to figure it out, states can nurture and protect their own local lending markets with state-owned banks, on the model of the Bank of North Dakota (BND).  Currently the nation’s only state-owned bank, the BND services the liquidity needs of local banks and keeps credit flowing in the state.  Other benefits to the local economy are detailed in a Demos report by Jason Judd and Heather McGhee titled “Banking on America: How Main Street Partnership Banks Can Improve Local Economies.”  They write: 

Alone among states, North Dakota had the wherewithal to keep credit moving to small businesses when they needed it most. BND’s business lending actually grew from 2007 to 2009 (the tightest months of the credit crisis) by 35 percent. BND accomplished this through participation loans, in which BND contributes to a community bank’s loan, in order to free up the bank’s capital for more lending. Other tools that boost bank lending power and lower interest rates include purchases of community bank stock and—together with the state’s targeted economic development programs—interest rate buy-downs. As a result, loan amounts per capita for small banks in North Dakota are fully 175% higher than the U.S. average in the last five years, and its banks have stronger loan-to-asset ratios than comparable states like Wyoming, South Dakota and Montana. 

Fourteen states have now initiated bills to establish state-owned banks or to study their feasibility.  Besides serving local lending needs, state-owned banks can provide cash-strapped states with new revenues, obviating the need to raise taxes, slash services or sell off public assets.

 The Global Debt Crisis: How We Got in it, and How to Get Out. 

Note that John Ford and I will be talking about this in Enosburg on June 11th at 7:00 at the Emergency Services Building. We will have a DVD of our tv show on the subject. Read Ellen's article here:  http://truthout.org/global-debt-crisis-how-we-got-it-and-how-get-out/1307386310

Get out your crystal balls. And while your'e at it - look back. Jim and Ethan.

Trigger Points

by Gary North

Recently by Gary North: Adam Smith, Meet Oprah Winfrey

 Get out your crystal balls.

When would a wise Jew have begun making plans to leave Germany? 1933? 1934? 1938? 1939?

In retrospect, most people would say 1933, the year Hitler was appointed (not elected) Chancellor by President von Hindenburg. On 30 January, Hitler became Chancellor. He asked Hindenburg to dissolve the government and schedule new elections for March 5, which Hindenburg did.

Should a Jew have begun packing his bags? Maybe not. Maybe after the next election, the Nazis would have been defeated.

On 27 February, the Reichstag building burned down. One man did it, who admitted he had done it. Hitler immediately identified him as a Communist, although even today, it is not clear that he did anything but act alone.

Hitler used this as a propaganda tool. On March 5, the Nazis got 44% of the popular vote, up from 33%. With an allied party, they had 52% of the vote in the Reichstag.

Was it time to pack the bags? Maybe not. The Nazis did not have a majority. They had only a coalition majority.

On March 23, the government passed the Enabling Act. It took a two-thirds vote to do this. Hitler now possessed dictatorial powers. He had attained these by means of support by rival political parties.

Was it time to pack the bags? Maybe not. Those powers might not be used.

On April 1, a one-day boycott of Jewish businesses was staged by the S.A., which were technically private storm troops. Was it time to pack those bags. Maybe not. This was not government-directed. It was only symbolic.

What about 1935's Nuremberg Laws on Citizenship and Race? They made it illegal for Jews to be citizens. But that was only politics. How many votes did Jews have, anyway? They were only 1% to 2% of the population. Politics isn't everything.

And so on, right down to Crystal Night in November 1938, when rioters broke the plate glass windows of 7,500 Jewish-owned businesses and burned or damaged 200 synagogues, meaning most synagogues in Germany.

After that, over 100,000 Jews packed their bags and departed. Between 1933 and 1939, about half the Jews in Germany emigrated: 250,000. But half did not.

There were a series of trigger points, 1933 to 1939. Most Jews sat tight until very late.

Yet in Austria, Ludwig von Mises saw the handwriting on the wall in 1934. He looked at the map. He concluded that the Nazis would wind up running Austria. Hitler was an Austrian, and he would want to control Austria. He packed his bags and took his first salaried teaching position, a job in Geneva, Switzerland. He warned Jewish friends to get out. Economist Gottfried Haberler did, in 1936. Economist Fritz Machlup already had. He fled in 1933. Well, not quite. He was in the United States in 1933, and he decided not to return to Austria. Both men found safe havens in the United States. So did Mises in 1940, when he left Switzerland, barely escaping German troops in France as he and his wife road a bus toward Spain, and from there to Portugal and the United States.

One might have thought that a careful reading of Mein Kampf (1926) would have been a sufficient trigger point in the Summer of 1933. The gun was loaded. Then the hammer was cocked in March: the Enabling Act.

Laws enacted by the Reich government shall be issued by the Chancellor and announced in the Reich Gazette. They shall take effect on the day following the announcement, unless they prescribe a different date. Articles 68 to 77 of the Constitution do not apply to laws enacted by the Reich government.

Articles 68 to 77 stipulated the procedures for enacting legislation in the Reichstag. "So what?" This seems to have been a mere technicality. The language was so procedural. But there was substance to it. As we read on Wiki, "The Enabling Act allowed the cabinet to enact legislation, including laws deviating from or altering the constitution, without the consent of the Reichstag."

It was time to move out and move on . . . and not just if you were Jewish.

Some people see the signs. Others do not. Some decide to get out while the getting is good. Others do not.

Incident by incident, trigger point by trigger point, people see signs. Most people ignore them. "It can't happen here." Most times it doesn't. Sometimes it does.

TRIGGERS AND SAFETIES

On April 5, 1933, President Franklin Roosevelt, in office for one month, signed Executive Order 6102.

Executive Order 6102 required U.S. citizens to deliver on or before May 1, 1933, all but a small amount of gold coin, gold bullion, and gold certificates owned by them to the Federal Reserve, in exchange for $20.67 per troy ounce. Under the Trading With the Enemy Act of October 6, 1917, as amended on March 9, 1933, violation of the order was punishable by fine up to $10,000 ($167,700 if adjusted for inflation as of 2010) or up to ten years in prison, or both.

There was no public outcry. There was no sense of loss. Violation of gold contracts, which had been legal ever since 1879, had taken place, but few people cared.

That was a trigger point. There were many others. The journalist Garet Garrett wrote of the New Deal in 1938, "the revolution was." It continued. It was, in his words, a revolution within the form.

There are those who still think they are holding the pass against a revolution that may be coming up the road. But they are gazing in the wrong direction. The revolution is behind them. It went by in the Night of Depression, singing songs to freedom.

 

There are those who have never ceased to say very earnestly, "Something is going to happen to the American form of government if we don't watch out." These were the innocent disarmers. Their trust was in words. They had forgotten their Aristotle. More than 2,000 years ago he wrote of what can happen within the form, when "one thing takes the place of another, so that the ancient laws will remain, while the power will be in the hands of those who have brought about revolution in the state."

Another monetary trigger point was Nixon's unilateral decision on August 15, 1971, to cancel all gold contracts with foreign central banks to pay an ounce of gold for $35. Again, there was no sense of outrage.

Along with that declaration, he froze wages and prices. There was widespread cheering in the business elite. That was a popular decision. The resulting shortages, losses due to bottlenecks, and lines in front of gasoline stations were not blamed on the controls, at least not by the average voter.

Over the next decade, the United States suffered the worst price inflation in its peacetime history. Gold went from $35 an ounce to over $800 an ounce in January 1980, falling only because Paul Volcker's Federal Reserve policy of tighter money (1979-82) reversed the inflationary panic.

Nixon's decision was a pair of trigger points, both having to do with the violation of contracts.

There were counter-indications: safeties, to stick with the analogy of triggers. The main ones were the reduction in top marginal income tax brackets, first by Kennedy and then by Reagan. Under Carter, price floors imposed by Federal regulatory agencies were reduced or eliminated. In transportation these changes produced rapid economic growth and innovation, along with price cutting. A decade earlier, the Federal Communications Commission's Carterfone decision began to break the back of AT&T's monopoly, which led to enormous innovation in telecommunications.

The passage of the Patriot Act of 2001 was a blow to liberty. The development of the Internet since 1995 has been a much greater advancement of liberty.

To shift the analogy, we are now in a "two steps forward, one step back" scenario. I think we have been since the end of the Vietnam War. The defeat of the United States was visible. The government has sought to reclaim the old trust, but it has failed to do so. The public accepts inconclusive, drawn-out wars in the Middle East only because it has no commitment to victory. Voters assume that there will be no victory. That is not the basis of strong political commitment. That is not the basis of that crucial form of political capital: legitimacy.

The public's support of the Federal government has been reduced to the Valley Girl's shrug: "Whatever." As long as the public gets access to its entertainment and does not suffer immediate pain, it ignores the Federal government. Bureaucrats prosper, but the tax resistance is forever. The Federal government has been unable to collect taxes in excess of 20% of GDP since 1946, and it has never collected more than 23%. The pubic loves increased spending, but only if it is borrowed.

So, money is borrowed. That borrowing is now facing resistance. The Federal Reserve is creating money to buy the deficit. China isn't. Japan isn't. PIMCO isn't. Interest rates are low because only the Federal government is borrowing heavily.

The Federal debt climbs relentlessly. The public does not care enough to accept cuts in spending, but it will not tolerate tax increases. The debate over the deficit is gridlocked. That means more debt. It also means default. Today's "no pain, big deficit" will become "big pain, big default." The only question is this: By what arrangement? Hyperinflation? Outright default? Piecemeal default?

BROKEN WINDOWS, BROKEN BUDGET

In Frederic Bastiat's story of the broken window, the public sees spending as a way to get the economy going. The broken window produces economic growth. The story points to the truth: it takes resources to repair windows. That is the thing not seen. The lesson: look for the thing not seen.

The thing not seen today is the cost of communication. Digits keep getting cheaper. Ideas spread far faster. Networks are created by the millions. And the government is in control of none of this.

The more oranges in the air, the harder the juggler's routine. This is the dilemma of every government on earth. The real economy is growing because of cost-cutting and innovation. The government wants to control this process, but it can't.

On all sides, the politicians are besieged. They cannot balance the budget. They have no intention of doing so. Yet their failure places them on the dole. Ben Bernanke is like some modern day J. P. Morgan, providing money in a crisis, the way Morgan did (briefly) in 1907. But what will happen when QE2 ceases? If the private sector wants to fund the Federal government, capital will shift to Washington, where it will be consumed.

The Federal government still parades as the ultimate source of bailouts, the safety net of the nation. But with whose money? Not the taxpayers' money. They won't pay. They have kept Federal revenues below 20% of GDP for two generations.

The Navy sends its dozen carriers to sweep the oceans, but it can't catch land-based guerillas. Without boots on the ground, there is no way for the military to impose its will. The fiscal bloodletting required to fund the deployed troops is huge. The Taliban is not losing. Iran is not losing. It is not clear that Qadaffi is losing. Where are we winning? "Wherever," says the Valley Girl.

The budget is the visible symbol of political futility. There is no resolution. The Democrats' version of the irresistible force is Medicare. The Republicans' version of the immovable object is tax resistance. The solution, so far, has been QE2. But it is scheduled to end on June 30.

Stalemate internationally is defeat. We will run out of money and patience. Stalemate domestically is defeat. We will run out of money and patience.

The government is fixing windows. Every time one gets fixed, two more get broken. Think of North Africa. Think of Pakistan and Afghanistan. Think of the deficit. Think of unemployment.

Crystal Night was deliberate. It was not metaphorical. But it was surely symbolic. We are watching the economic equivalent of crystal night. The windows keep breaking. The policies of fixing the broken glass seem to lead to more broken glass. The new windows must be paid for. By whom? For how long? At what rate of interest?

"WE TOLD YOU SO"

At some point, there will be too much broken glass for the government to conduct business as usual. Interest rates will rise. Prices will rise. Output will slow. Unemployment will rise.

When politics shifts to establishing blame for visible failures, the licensed airwaves and shrinking print media will be filled with versions of "We told you so." The Establishment will have its explanation, which will be Paul Krugman's "the Federal government should have spent more." On that defense, the Keynesian Establishment will bet the farm.

In contrast will be the Internet, which will be multiple networks of blame-shifting. But there will be a common theme: "Tax somebody else." Blame will be handed out to many deserving candidates, but the common theme will be this: "They bailed out their cronies."

The future of American politics will be settled by the winning faction in the blame-shifting enterprise. But the winners will have to be able to back it up with this: "We told you so."

The economic gurus of the future will have to do the same.

So will the hedge funds and portfolio managers.

To survive the coming fiscal cataclysm, one must be vocal now. One must also put his money where his mouth is. And he had better keep more of his money than the competition.

CONCLUSION

Modern men know little history. Few people today know the central issue of World War II. The World War I settlement allowed Germany access to the free city of Danzig, a port city. Beck, the Polish Foreign Minister, refused to grant this access in 1939. Germany invaded Poland. So did the Soviet Union three weeks later. Jews caught in the west got trapped by the German Army. Those in the east were trapped by the Soviet Army. Germany's invasion of the USSR in June 1941 sealed the fate of Jews in Poland.

Poles paid little attention to German politics in the 1930s. Jews in Poland were not concerned with these details until 1939. By then it was too late. They were victims who had no warning.

This is always the fate of those caught in a crossfire.

The average citizen has no real understanding of the underlying causes of booms and busts. He trusts the government. He thinks that those in charge know what they are doing. Yet the evidence indicates otherwise.

There will be victims. The Great Default will affect millions of people who do not understand that they are at risk or why.

I suggest that you mentally identify some trigger points as indicators. When they are set off, one by one, increase your commitment to finding and funding a port in the coming storm.

May 28, 2011

Gary North [send him mail] is the author of Mises on Money. Visit http://www.garynorth.com. He is also the author of a free 20-volume series, An Economic Commentary on the Bible.