Peak Prosperity News Feed

Mark Skousen: Surveillance Technology Is Advancing Faster Than We Can Responsibly Use It

Adam Taggart — Sun, 16 Jun 2013 15:45:34 +0000

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In the wake of the recent news revealing the extent of the NSA's level of citizen surveillance through supernetworks like PRISM, Chris speaks this week with Mark Skousen, former-CIA-agent turned founder-of-FreedomFest, one of the countries largest "gatherings of free minds."

Mark argues that in this case, technology has advanced at a far faster pace than our culture's ability to understand how to use it effectively, responsibly, and how to regulate it:

Is Gold at a Turning Point?

Adam Taggart — Thu, 13 Jun 2013 01:18:21 +0000

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There's no way to sugarcoat the dismal performance of the precious metals in recent months. But a revisitation of the reasons for owning them reveals no cracks in the underlying thesis for doing so.

In fact, there are a number of new compelling developments arguing that the long heartbreak for gold and silver holders will soon be over.

Ron Paul: Rejecting Authoritarian Government Is Our Greatest Priority

Adam Taggart — Sun, 09 Jun 2013 16:00:26 +0000

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Dr Ron Paul has long been a leading voice for limited constitutional government, low taxes, free markets, sound money, civil liberty, and non-interventionist foreign policies.

His last term in the U.S. House of Representatives ended earlier this year, so we caught up with the former Congressman to get his latest perspective on how successfully our national leadership is dealing with America’s economic challenges.

Housing Prices Are Being Dangerously Distorted by Big Institutional Money

cmartenson — Tue, 04 Jun 2013 14:20:44 +0000

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The airwaves are full of stories of economic recovery. One trumpeted recently has been the rapid recovery in housing, at least as measured in prices.

The problem is, a good portion of the rebound in house prices in many markets has less to do with renewed optimism, new jobs, and rising wages, and more to do with big money investors fueled by the ultra-cheap money policies of the Fed.

Indigenous: Sourcing Our Clothing Sustainably

Adam Taggart — Wed, 29 May 2013 19:16:57 +0000

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When you buy a piece of clothing, how much thought do you give to how it was made?

Few shoppers do. But they should. In many respects, where our clothes comes from is nearly as important as where our food comes from.

The recent tragedy in Bangladesh, where over 1,000 sweatshop workers died in a building collapse, provides a stark reminder of this.

In this podcast, I talk with retail entrepreneurs Scott Leonard and Matt Reynolds, co-founders of Indigenous Designs, to get a better understanding of the notoriety the textile industry has earned (much of it well-deserved) and learn about new business models that promise to transform it for the better.

America the Vulnerable

JHK — Tue, 28 May 2013 00:13:27 +0000

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For most people, the collapse of civilizations is a subject much more appetizingly viewed in the rearview mirror than straight ahead down whatever path or roadway we are on.

Jared Diamond wrote about the collapse of earlier civilizations to great acclaim and brisk sales, in a nimbus of unimpeachable respectability. The stories he told about bygone cultures gone to seed were, above all, dramatic. No reviewers or other intellectual auditors dissed him for suggesting that empires inevitably run aground on the shoals of resource depletion, population overshoot, changes in the weather, and the diminishing returns of complexity.

Yet these are exactly the same problems that industrial-technocratic societies face today, and those of us who venture to discuss them are consigned to a tin-foil-hat brigade, along with the UFO abductees and Bigfoot trackers. This is unfortunate, but completely predictable, since the sunk costs in all the stuff of daily life (freeways, malls, tract houses) are so grotesquely huge that letting go of them is strictly unthinkable. We’re stuck with a very elaborate setup that has no future, but we refuse to consider the consequences...

Bill Black: Our System is So Flawed That Fraud is Mathematically Guaranteed

Adam Taggart — Sat, 25 May 2013 17:06:35 +0000

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[Chris lost his voice this week due to illness, so we were unable to record a new podcast. So while Chris recuperates, enjoy this excellent discussion from the archives will Bill Black, recorded a year ago, on the pervasive control fraud within our current financial system. ~ Adam]

“When plunder becomes a way of life for a group of men in a society, over the course of time they create for themselves a legal system that authorizes it and a moral code that glorifies it." ~ Frederic Bastiat

Bill Black is a former bank regulator who played a central role in prosecuting the corruption responsible for the S&L crisis of the late 1980s. He is one of America's top experts on financial fraud. And he laments that the U.S. has descended into a type of crony capitalism that makes continued fraud a virtual certainty while increasingly neutering the safeguards intended to prevent and punish such abuse.

In this extensive interview, Bill explains why financial fraud is the most damaging type of fraud and also the hardest to prosecute. He also details how, through crony capitalism, it has become much more prevalent in our markets and political system.

A warning: There's much revealed in this interview that will make your blood boil. For example, the Office of Thrift Supervision. In the aftermath of the S&L crisis, this office brought 3,000 administration enforcement actions (a.k.a. lawsuits) against identified perpetrators. In a number of cases, they clawed back the funds and profits that the convicted parties had fraudulently obtained.

Flash forward to the 2008 credit crisis, in which just the related household sector losses alone were over 70 times greater than those seen during the entire S&L debacle. So how many criminal referrals did the same agency, the Office of Thrift Supervision, make?

Zero.

Reality-Check Time

Adam Taggart — Fri, 24 May 2013 15:28:19 +0000

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Let's take a quick break from detailed analysis for a moment and zoom up to the birds-eye view.

What motivates us to spend time here at PeakProsperity.com?

Four Signs That We're Back in Dangerous Bubble Territory

cmartenson — Tue, 21 May 2013 23:09:54 +0000

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As the global equity and bond markets grind ever higher, abundant signs exist that we are once again living through an asset bubble – or rather a whole series of bubbles in a variety of markets. This makes this period quite interesting, but also quite dangerous.

With equity and bond markets at or near all-time record highs, with all financial assets consistently shrugging off bad – or worse – news as the riskiest of assets continue to find consistent upward bids, we find ourselves in familiar and bubbly territory.

Are the Predominant Macro Trends About to Reverse?

Adam Taggart — Mon, 20 May 2013 20:29:24 +0000

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I felt a great disturbance in the Force

-- Obi-Wan Kenobi

If you've been watching the precious metals closely – what a day! Both gold and silver plummeted in overnight trading. And by "plummet," I mean the gut-wrenching vertically-straight-down kind of free-fall (silver was down nearly 10% over a matter of minutes). Then, after a few hours of partial recovery and stabilizing, the precious metals went parabolic in the up direction.