Ron Paul announces presidential run, says Obama can't win youth vote

Rep. Ron Paul, the Texas Republican known for his staunch libertarian views, announced today he's forming a presidential exploratory committee.

This marks Paul's third bid for the presidency. He first ran in 1988 and again in 2008, winning a small but enthusiastic group of supporters among the GOP electorate.

Part of Paul's fervent support in 2008 was grounded in college-aged voters, a constituency that also largely favored Barack Obama. In this campaign, the 75-year-old Paul said today, Mr. Obama won't be able to hang on to the youth vote.

"I think that Obama will not be able to hang on to that enthusiasm of the young people because of what's happened in the last couple years," Paul said in Des Moines, Iowa, after his exploratory committee was announced.

The financial crisis, the bloated deficit and the ongoing wars make the libertarian views Paul is known for -- such as his anti-interventionist foreign policy and his antipathy toward the Federal Reserve -- even more relevant than in 2008, Paul suggested.

You can check out his new website here.

True Key U.S. Statistics

Shadowstats.com calculates Key U.S. Statistics the way they were calculated in the 1980s and 1990s before Official Data Manipulation began in earnest. Consider

Bogus Official Numbers      vs.      Real Numbers (per Shadowstats.com)

Annual U.S. Consumer Price Inflation reported April 15, 2011
2.68%                   /                   10.2% (annualized March, 2011 Rate)

U.S. Unemployment reported April 1, 2011
8.8%               /                22%

U.S. GDP Annual Growth/Decline reported March 25, 2011
2.78%                /                      - 2.21%

U.S. M3 reported April 17, 2011 (Month of March, Y.O.Y.)
No Official Report      /       - 0.87%

Reviewing the Aforementioned Figures (Note: CPI is rising up to 10.2% annualized from 9.6% in February) makes it easy to understand why Gold and Silver Prices have been skyrocketing lately.

Gold and Silver are Real Money, and as increasing numbers of Investor-Citizens around the World become aware that the Purchasing Power of their Fiat Currencies is diminishing (10.2%/yr. in the USA!), the more they flock to purchase these Precious Metals.

Of course, thus Trend greatly concerns the Mega-Bankers because it tends to delegitimize and degrade the value of their Paper/Digital Treasury Securities and Fiat Currencies (as well it should!).

Preparing for the “crisis window”

This is a Financial Sense podcast.

Joel Salatin of Polyface Farm in Virginia offers workable solutions to the average person in how to mitigate the projected tripling of food prices in the next decade.

Silver: The Undervalued Asset Looking for a Catalyst

The most important point to understand is that silver and gold represent real money that is not someone else’s liability.

Precious metals stand in sharp contrast to the fiat currency system that now dominates global finance. This system of credit and paper money—with nothing to back it—is now heading straight for a financial crisis with the dollar at its epicenter.

 
The dollar's recent declines have been arrested through active intervention in the currency markets. However, history shows that planned intervention eventually fails. The markets always, and I say always win out in the end.

The present madness or delusion at the Fed that they can create prosperity through massive debt creation is about to be shattered. The trade deficit, the national and state governments' deficits and America’s total outstanding debt dramatically show that this giant mountain of debt is about to reach its upper limits. When consumers no longer have the ability to borrow money or extract equity out of their homes, when the housing bubble begins to deflate, when foreigners no longer buy our paper or even worse—refuse to accept it as payment—the crisis will be upon us.

America’s debt problem is so large now that the only way out is to inflate our way out of it. The appetite for government spending in this country is insatiable. We are running not only large current account balances with the rest of the world, but we are also incurring large budget deficits that could run as high as $400 billion and go still higher. At the same time we are also about to add a major new entitlement at a time we are at war. It is back to guns and butter again, although this time our debt levels are far greater. This means that with government revenues declining and government spending accelerating, the government is now actively printing dollars to finance its deficits. This is what is causing the dollar to depreciate.

Insolvent and Going Deeper

The US is on a fiscally unsustainable path and has almost entirely wasted the opportunity this crisis represented to get its house in order.

Obama, and whoever sits in the oval office next, has an enormously difficult task of explaining to ordinary people why the belt tightening that is to come applies to them and not to the banks that created the mess (and are feverishly handing out record bonuses as a result).

Given this constraint, and the general paralysis of logic that now grips DC, we can almost certainly expect that the resolution to the multi-decade game of kick-the-can will be a crisis of sorts. 

The only way out is to accept the idea that living standards have to fall to match the prior excesses, an admission that 'experts' agree is politically impossible in the US at this time.

Yet the conditions and risks remain, regardless of what experts think is doable.  The job of any primary bear market -- and we are in the mother of them all -- is to destroy wealth.  Your job is to preserve wealth. But buckle up; it's going to be a rough ride.  

My overall advice for what's to come remains: Convert your fiat money to useful things. True, gold doesn't earn any interest, but neither does money in the bank these days, and gold can't be devlaued away by reckless monetary policy. So holding precious metals for purchasing power preservation should be a fundamental part of your plans. And while there is real risk of a short-term deflationary downdraft in commodities as the Fed jawbones about ending quantitative easing, my general advice is anything that you expect to buy over the next year you should just buy now. What the heck, you'll use it anyways, and you just might buy it for a lot cheaper than later on.

Enjoy life, love your family, and note that the sun still rises, the birds still sing, and all of our human foibles will resolve themselves eventually. We've arrived at a peculiar point in history where attitude is a tangible element of your future wealth and paper money has become like fog on a warm morning.

Justice Department Has No AppetiteTo Go After Goldman Sachs.

Extend and Pretend Is Wall Street's Friend

The reality on the ground does not match the rhetoric coming from the government, Wall Street and the corporate mainstream media. The truth is as follows:

• The vacancy rate for office space in the U.S. is currently 16.5%.
• The vacancy rate for industrial space in the U.S. is currently 14.2%.
• The vacancy rate for retail space in the U.S. is currently 13%.
• Delinquencies within collateralized debt obligations in commercial real estate loans rose to 14.6% in February. The increase signals a trend of higher delinquencies in the segment. Signs of pressure surfaced as early as January when the delinquency rate on CDOs within commercial real estate loans hovered well above 13%.
• According to Moody’s, CRE prices are down 4.3% from a year ago and down about 43% from the peak in 2007.
• The delinquency rate on loans packaged and sold in commercial mortgage-backed securities rose to a record 9.2% in February, according to a March 15 report by Moody’s.
• Regional and local community banks have as much as 80% of their balance sheets tied up in commercial real estate, and very few other sources of significant fee income to offset CRE losses.
• CRE once had an estimated national value of $6.5 trillion. Today it stands at an optimistic $3.5 trillion.
• There are 1.8 million homes seriously delinquent, in the foreclosure process or REO that are not currently listed for sale.
• There are about 2 million current negative equity loans that are more than 50% “upside down”.
• Home prices are off 31.3% from the peak. The Composite 20 is only 0.7% above the May 2009 post-bubble bottom and will probably be at a new post-bubble low soon.

The silver supply constraints

Inflation Actually Near 10% Using Older Measure

Cause of Civil War still debated 150 years later

Iran Bought GoldTo Cut Dollar Exposure

Market observers believe Tehran has been one of the biggest buyers of bullion over the past decade after China, Russia and India, and is among the 20 largest holders of gold reserves.

 

They estimate it holds more than 300 tonnes of gold, up from 168.4 tonnes in 1996, the date of the most recent International Monetary Fund data.

Quote for April 13th, 2011

The financial policy of the welfare state requires that there be no way for the owners of wealth to protect themselves.

This is the shabby secret of the welfare statists' tirades against gold.

Deficit spending is simply a scheme for the confiscation of wealth.

Gold stands in the way of this insidious process. It stands as a protector of property rights.

If one grasps this, one has no difficulty in understanding the statists' antagonism toward the gold standard. 

- Alan Greenspan

Ron Paul Links Bullion Coin Shortage To Horrendous Currency Debasement

Rep. Ron Paul, during a Subcommittee hearing on problems at the US Mint, linked the shortage of gold and silver coins to the "huge debasement" of the United States currency.

Time to End the Fed? The Origin of Central Banking and Possible Alternatives

History of the Federal Reserve Bank: Glenn Beck interviews G. Edward Griffin

Justice Dept. to Congress: Don’t Saddle 4th Amendment on Us

The Obama administration is urging Congress NOT to adopt legislation that would impose constitutional safeguards on Americans’ e-mail stored in the cloud.

As the law stands now, the authorities may obtain cloud e-mail without a warrant if it is older than 180 days, thanks to the Electronic Communications Privacy Act adopted in 1986. At that time, e-mail left on a third-party server for six months was considered to be abandoned, and thus enjoyed less privacy protection. However, the law demands warrants for the authorities to seize e-mail from a person’s hard drive.

A coalition of internet service providers and other groups, known as Digital Due Process, has lobbied for an update to the law to treat both cloud- and home-stored e-mail the same, and thus require a probable-cause warrant for access. The Senate Judiciary Committee held a hearing on that topic Tuesday.

Many Low-Wage Jobs Seen as Failing to Meet Basic Needs

With an unemployment rate that has been stubbornly stuck near 9 percent... many of the jobs being added in retail, hospitality and home health care, to name a few categories, are unlikely to pay enough for workers to cover the cost of fundamentals like housing, utilities, food, health care, transportation and, in the case of working parents, child care.
A separate report ... tries to go beyond traditional measurements like the poverty line and minimum wage to show what people need to earn to achieve a basic standard of living.  [It] builds on an analysis... on how much income it takes to meet basic needs without relying on public subsidies. The new study aims to set thresholds for economic stability rather than mere survival, and takes into account saving for retirement and emergencies. 
According to the report, a single worker needs an income of $30,012 a year — or just above $14 an hour — to cover basic expenses and save for retirement and emergencies. That is close to three times the 2010 national poverty level of $10,830 for a single person, and nearly twice the federal minimum wage of $7.25 an hour.
A single worker with two young children needs an annual income of $57,756, or just over $27 an hour, to attain economic stability, and a family with two working parents and two young children needs to earn $67,920 a year, or about $16 an hour per worker.
That compares with the national poverty level of $22,050 for a family of four. The most recent data from the Census Bureau found that 14.3 percent of Americans were living below the poverty line in 2009.

A First in American History: 2011 Federal Aid Set to Overwhelm State General Funds

New research indicates 2011 will be the first year that federal aid becomes the largest component of state revenues. Already 27 states, including Louisiana, rely on federal aid as their primary source of funding, but the report’s author describes this year’s level as a critical breaking point.
“It sends a profound message,” says Sven Larson, a research fellow with the Wyoming Liberty Group. “There is a growing consensus among the states that dependency on the federal government is tolerable, even desirable.”
While state revenues have declined during the Great Recession, debt-financed federal aid has risen. Nationwide it now stands at more than one third of total state revenues, with greater state conformity over the level of federal aid dependence.
In 2010, Oklahoma and Louisiana were the most dependent, with federal aid comprising 50 percent or more of their revenue. Ten other states were more than 40 percent dependent, compared to only one state in 2005 – Louisiana at 45 percent. (Click here for a ranking of state financial dependency.)

Union Myths

The biggest myth about labor unions is that unions are for the workers. Unions are for unions, just as corporations are for corporations and politicians are for politicians.
Nothing shows the utter cynicism of the unions and the politicians who do their bidding like the so-called "Employee Free Choice Act" that the Obama administration tried to push through Congress. Employees' free choice as to whether or not to join a union is precisely what that legislation would destroy.
Workers already have a free choice in secret-ballot elections conducted under existing laws. As more and more workers in the private sector have voted to reject having a union represent them, the unions' answer has been to take away secret-ballot elections.
Under the "Employee Free Choice Act," unions would not have to win in secret-ballot elections in order to represent the workers. Instead, union representatives could simply collect signatures from the workers until they had a majority.
Why do we have secret ballots in the first place, whether in elections for unions or elections for government officials? To prevent intimidation and allow people to vote how they want to, without fear of retaliation. 
The most fundamental fact about labor unions is that they do not create any wealth. They are one of a growing number of institutions which specialize in siphoning off wealth created by others, whether those others are businesses or the taxpayers.  
There are limits to how long unions can siphon off money from businesses, without facing serious economic repercussions.