Tice Proves Every Bear Has Its Day, Invokes `D' Word (Update1) By Edward Robinson May 21 (Bloomberg) -- Money manager David Tice pokes his head into a conference room at his Dallas offices and tells Doug Noland , his top market strategist, the morning investment meeting is starting. ``It's a historic day,'' Tice says as he disappears down the hall. ``This is crazy; just wild.'' It's March 13, one of the worst days yet in the spiraling credit crisis. Shares of Bear Stearns Cos . are falling en route to the bank's emergency rescue 72 hours later. Buyout giant Carlyle Group's mortgage bond fund has collapsed after defaulting on $16.6 billion of debt. The U.S. dollar is trading at a record low of $1.56 to the euro. New York University economics professor Nouriel Roubini is forecasting a severe recession that may last six quarters. ``Cookie anyone?'' says Tice, 53, offering peanut butter Girl Scout sandwich cremes to four members of his investmen...

I have to warn you. This is a resource rich article and it may take time to read, but to sum it up, mercantilism is causing the food crisis led by investment in inefficient corn and wheat and rice biofuels and coupled with protectionism that prevents us from getting food from the US to where it needed and increased gas prices that are also based on mercantilistic markets and not supply and demand. If you have time and are interested in the world food crisis, it is worth the time it takes to read. Food crises are not new. Throughout the 1860's Ireland suffered one of the most devastating food crisis ever recorded. Almost a million people died according to most of the books on the The Great Hunger . Today's food crisis is no different. It is an Irish style famine in mass and effecting the poorest people in the world. Is it a crisis of capitalism? No, not really, capitalism when it works correctly capitalism should provide markets to fill in the void so if one country is short of ...

....the problems with the economy do not stem from consumption related issues, they stem from 1.) the lack of domestic production, and 2.) super liquidity. Overall there are too many dollars floating around in the economic system to try to "provide full employment and low interest rates," to use Bernanke's words, while not creating opportunity through the productive mechanisms of the economic structure. So basically, what he means is that after Wall Street has been slathered with enough green to cover a St. Paddy's day festival in Ireland , and the value of the dollar collapses, we will need an alternate way to fuel the economic structure. This can be done in three ways, 1.) by opening the economy up for the average person to competing currencies and the use of commodities as trade items, or a return to the use of "silver and gold" as legal tender or 2.) through a political and populist redistribution of wealth and 3.) through continued aggressive warfare t...

. . . it creates the dangerous illusion that we're somehow winning (or even fighting) the right war. Last week I posted Minimum wage, living wage, and the State as Vampire to the Working Poor , in which I argued that the real culprit in keeping the poor in working poor was the government tax bite, not the penury of business owners. If you haven't read that one, you should go back and do so, because the argument is pretty detailed. But if you're not willing, here was my main point: Poverty in America's Living Wage Calculator reports for Delaware that Federal and State taxes (income plus payroll) take a 16.5% bite out of a family of four struggling to reach their target living wage of $45,673. If we were to adopt the principle of not taxing people until after they had earned enough money to meet their family's basic needs , each earner in a two-income family of four would only need to average $9.57/hour in order to achieve the living wage . Under our current ...

I usually try to avoid stealing stories from other Delaware blogs, but over at Colossus Hube got me this time with The Smallest Violin , about British families that now live completely on the dole and believe it is their absolute right not to have to work, ever. According to the original story in the Daily Mail : Six million Britons are living in homes where no one has a job and "benefits are a way of life", according to a report by MPs. Shock figures also revealed that 20,000 households in Britain are pocketing more than £30,000 a year in state benefits. With thousands of children growing up in families where their parents and grandparents have never worked, a senior government adviser warned this week of a "terrible legacy" of youngsters who had no expectation of ever getting a job. The quotes from the ten-member McFadden family are so unnerving that even Daily Mail readers (and Hube!) at first thought the piece must be a satire: "I left school at 15 with no...