Negative interest? Never heard of it? Sounds strange? A negative interest rate at a bank or institution, means simply that there is a charge for you to deposit your dollars in such a place. You get no interest, and you have to pay for the privilege. It’s already happening in a few places in the […]
Silver may buy drugs now, however this is not about 2019, but a time beginning over a hundred years ago. It concerned China during the Qing Dynasty, which ran from the mid 1800’s to 1911. 72 years earlier, in 1839, what is known as “The Opium War” began. Before that war started, Chinese porcelains and […]
The radical left, and for that matter the entire Democratic Party, have pulled out all the stops to remove Donald Trump from office. They have used fake news constantly, the Mueller Report, and now are trying to impeach him, which also will not work. They simply cannot believe he won, and are convinced that it […]
I am reminded of the fact that “The Wizard of Oz” had political meanings, as I wrote in the past, but that a comic strip also was based on the artist-creator’s politics also, and that was “Little Orphan Annie,” created by Harold Gray in 1924, and which continued till 1969, when he died of cancer, […]
A simple murder started one of the greatest wars in history. World War one began as follows, and if you have never heard about the total absurdity of it all, here’s a brief synopsis. On June 14, 1914, Austrian Archduke Franz Ferdinand was assassinated in Sarajevo, which led to a frantic month of diplomatic maneuvering […]
A few years ago, in a column I mentioned ‘musical chairs,’ and compared them to paper currencies which have quickly gone down so quickly, that it was impossible to protect one’s self from them. In the game of ‘musical chairs,’ there is one less chair than the number of players. When the music stops, obviously […]
The concept of a maximum speed limit on a highway has always fascinated me. Since everyone on the road has different capabilities and drives a vehicle with different safety and efficiency characteristics, how can the government justify a common maximum speed? If I’m driving a late model sports car with new tires and modern safety […]
On December 23, 1667, a 14.717 acre Island in New York Harbor was sold to Isaac Bedloe. In 1732, his estate sold it to the U.S. Government for an undisclosed price. The island had always been called “Oyster Island,” due to the huge number of oyster beds surrounding it. It was named “Bedloe’s Island” […]
On and on it goes: It’s not difficult to find a site on the internet which will groan and swear that the U.S. economy and dollar is trash, and within a few weeks or months, it’ll all be over. As a WWII general (McAuliffe) replied, when asked to give up and surrender, he gave a […]
On June 17, 1930, President Herbert Hoover signed into law, the Smoot-Hawley tariff, which raised import duties an average of 59% on more than 25,000 agricultural commodities and manufactured goods. Remember, a year earlier, the Great Depression began with the stock market crashing, and huge amounts of unemployment. The market crashed again when Smoot-Hawley began, […]