If you’ve not yet read Part 1, click here to do so.
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Dave Collum: 2019 Year in Review (Part 2)
"And Epstein didn't kill himself!"
by Adam Taggart
Friday, December 20, 2019, 4:45 PM
2
Friday, December 20, 2019, 4:45 PM
2
If you’ve not yet read Part 1, click here to do so.
Tuesday, July 2, 2019, 10:17 AM
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In this week’s Off The Cuff podcast, Chris and Charles Hugh Smith discuss:
This week Chris and Charles take a close look at the platforms being promoted by the bevy of presidential hopefuls, and lament the lock-step commitment to the same “business as usual” that is destroying the prospects and well-being of everyday Americans.
Rather than looking critically at the “borrow and spend” addiction that is drowning us under an unserviceable mountain of debt and liabilities, the candidates are hustling to out-compete each other in spending $trillions more. All, of course, in service to the corporate cartels donating to their campaigns:
Click to listen to a sample of this Off the Cuff Podcast or Enroll today to access the full audio as well as all of PeakProsperity.com’s other premium content.
Friday, July 29, 2016, 7:31 PM
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In our household, we measure inflation with the "Burrito Index": How much has the cost of a regular burrito at our favorite taco truck gone up?
Since we keep detailed records of expenses (a necessity if you’re a self-employed free-lance writer), I can track the real-world inflation of the Burrito Index with great accuracy: the cost of a regular burrito from our local taco truck has gone up from $2.50 in 2001 to $5 in 2010 to $6.50 in 2016.
That’s a $160% increase since 2001; 15 years in which the official inflation rate reports that what $1 bought in 2001 can supposedly be bought with $1.35 today.
Tuesday, January 14, 2014, 11:02 PM
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Going to college in the USA has never been cheap, but those who haven’t been in the market recently don’t realize how crazy it’s become.
Monday, November 4, 2013, 7:37 PM
3
We all intuitively grasp the meaning of diminishing returns: Either it takes more effort to maintain a project’s payoff, or the payoff declines even though the effort invested remains constant.
This dynamic leads to the final phase of doing more of what has failed spectacularly.
Thursday, October 3, 2013, 10:10 PM
15
There is a revolution underway in education that is being driven by digital technology. Like all technologically fueled upheavals, this revolution requires creative destruction of the current industry, which is resisting the revolution even as it attempts to embrace the parts that might preserve the status quo.
Thursday, October 3, 2013, 10:09 PM
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If you have not yet read The (Needed) Revolution Emerging in Education, available free to all readers, please click here to read it first.
In Part I, we surveyed the foundations of Higher Education and its obsolete Factory Model. We described its predatory reliance on student loans to feed its bloated cost structure and its failure to provide students with the skills needed in the economy of the 2010s; i.e., the emerging economy.
In essence, the foundation of higher education has been completely upended. Knowledge and instruction, once costly and scarce, are now abundant and nearly free. The only pricing power left to Higher Education cartel is the artificial scarcity of credentials.
That is not the power of a productive system; it is the power of a predatory system.
There are four broad technology-enabled solutions that would free higher education from its current cartel limitations on opportunities and accreditation…
Thursday, September 26, 2013, 6:20 PM
7
In this week's Off the Cuff podcast, Chris and Charles discuss:
Saturday, September 14, 2013, 4:15 PM
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The cost of higher education has skyrocketed in recent decades. The average cost of tuition is up over 1,000% since the 1980s, far outstripping price inflation and most other goods and services.
Yet despite the accelerated cost, the value of a college degree has been diminishing, both in the terms of quality of education received, as well as future employment prospects.
Thursday, August 1, 2013, 5:18 AM
4
If you have not yet read Part I: The Fed Matters Much Less Than You Think, available free to all readers, please click here to read it first.
In Part I, we found that the supposedly omniscient Federal Reserve is irrelevant to the engine of real wealth creation (innovation) and actively inhibits the allocation of capital and labor to innovation by incentivizing speculation and malinvestment.
In Part II, we’ll look at what else matters that the Fed either negatively influences or does not control, as well as specific actions we can take as individuals to insulate ourselves from the collateral damage caused by misguided central bank policies.
We all know health and education are vital to individuals and the economy, and like everything else that matters, the Fed’s influence is limited to financial repression of interest rates that enables the Federal government to avoid the sort of healthy fiscal discipline that higher rates would demand. In other words, the Fed has widened the moat around government spending, protecting it from the hard choices that would accompany massive deficits and bond issuance in a free-market economy.
By at least one measure, the Fed’s repression of interest rates (designed to recapitalize the banks at no direct cost to the Fed or government) has cost savers $10.8 trillion in lost income. Since the majority of savings in the U.S. are in public and private pension plans, 401Ks, and IRAs (individual retirement accounts), the Fed’s repression of interest rates has pushed these income-security savings into risky speculative asset bubbles in stocks, bonds, and real estate, and critically undermined the financial health of pensions by radically reducing their low-risk, safe returns.
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