Listening to "Peter Schweizer, Throw Them All Out 11-30-2011" from the Financial Sense Newshour podcast.

Nov/30/2011Peter Schweizer, Throw Them All OutHow Politicians and Their Friends Get Rich Off Insider Stock Tips, Land Deals, and Cronyism That Would Send the Rest of Us to PrisonOne of the biggest scandals in American politics is waiting to explode: the full story of the inside game in Washington shows how the permanent political class enriches itself at the expense of the rest of us. Peter Schweizer With James J Puplava CFP

http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/fsn/~5/VGnMvgkoa8Y/fsn2011-1130-1.mp3

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-Mark

2011 Hypothetical Portfolio Review

Here are this year's (11/25/2010- 11/25/2011) estimated returns on the hypothetical portfolio I posted back in Nov. 2004. Over the same period, the S&P 500 Index returned approximately -1.17% (including dividends).

Going forward into 2012, we will adjust the allocations to be as follows:

Here are the historical results:

Click here for last year's results.

Ron Paul Highlights in 11/22/11 Debate

Awesome performance by Ron Paul in this debate. These are just the highlights but if you've seen the other candidates speak, you know they are all mental midgets in comparison to Paul.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VHXBXC92eMc&feature=youtube_gdata_player

Listening to "Farmageddon-The Unseen War to Shut Down American Family Farms 11-23-2011" from the Financial Sense Newshour podcast.

Nov/23/2011Farmageddon-The Unseen War to Shut Down American Family FarmsAmericas right to access fresh foods of their choice is under attackFilmmaker Kristin Canty tells the story of small, family farms that were providing safe, healthy foods to their communities and were forced to stop, sometimes through violent action, by agents of government bureaucracies. Kristin seeks to understand why and through this film add her voice to the movement to protect and preserve the dwindling number of American family farms struggling to survive.James J Puplava CFP With Kristin Canty

http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/fsn/~5/_-ZcqPHEv2w/fsn2011-1123-1.mp3

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-Mark

My Favorite Economics and Investing Podcasts

These podcasts are must-listens for keeping up on the latest economics and investment market news. Turn off the CNBC fluff for a minute and get some real analysis from experts who have a clue when it comes to economics:

King World News Broadcast

S&A Investor Radio w/ Frank Curzio

Financial Sense Newshour

Global Insights-Global-Macroeconomic Audio Discussions

Peter Schiff Show Whole Show

Downcast iPhone App: an awesome podcast utility

I recently came across this app while reading this review on lifehacker. It costs $2 but is well worth it. Just put in all your favorite podcasts and it will track them, download the latest episodes and automatically create a playlist of them for you. For all this, no syncing with itunes necessary! Also, you can listen to the podcasts at up to 3x speed which is faster than the ipod app allows. This app saves me a ton of time and may have single app-edly convinced me to stick with my iPhone for now (instead of switching to Android and getting a Samsung Galaxy Nexus).

Check out this application on the App Store:

Downcast Jamawkinaw Enterprises Category: News Updated: Oct 22, 2011 75 Ratings

Check out QuickChartsPro - Stock Market Charting Utility

Check out my new iPad/iPhone application on the App Store:

QuickChartsPro - Stock Market Charting Utility RunReason.com Category: Finance Updated: Nov 09, 2011

Triumph the Insult Comic Dog at OWS

Hilarious!

How a Highly Productive and Provident One Percent Provides the Standard of L...

How a Highly Productive and Provident One Percent Provides the Standard of Living of a Largely Ignorant and Ungrateful Ninety-Nine Percent

via George Reisman's Blog on Economics, Politics, Society, and Culture by noreply@blogger.com (George Reisman's Blog) on 10/19/11

The protesters in the Occupy Wall Street Movement and its numerous clones elsewhere in the country and around the world chant that one percent of the population owns all the wealth and lives at the expense of the remaining ninety-nine percent. The obvious solution that they imply is for the ninety-nine percent to seize the wealth of the one percent and use it for their benefit rather than allowing it to continue to be used for the benefit of the one percent, who are allegedly undeserving greedy capitalist exploiters. In other words, the implicit program of the protesters is that of socialism and the redistribution of wealth.

Putting aside the hyperbole in the movement's claim, it is true that a relatively small minority of people does own the far greater part of the wealth of the country. The figures "one percent" and "ninety-nine" percent, however exaggerated, serve to place that fact in the strongest possible light.

What the protesters do not realize is that the wealth of the one percent provides the standard of living of the ninety-nine percent.

The protesters have no awareness of this, because they see the world through an intellectual lens that is inappropriate to life under capitalism and its market economy. They see a world, still present in some places, and present everywhere a few centuries ago, of self-sufficient farm families, each producing for its own consumption and having no essential connection to markets.

In such a world, if one sees a farmer's field, or his barn, or plow, or draft animals, and asks who do these means of production serve, the answer is the farmer and his family, and no one else. In such a world, apart from the receipt of occasional charity from the owners, those who are not owners of means of production cannot benefit from means of production unless and until they themselves somehow become owners of means of production. They cannot benefit from other people's means of production except by inheriting them or by seizing them.

In the world of the protesters, means of production have the same essential status as consumers' goods, which as a rule are of benefit only to their owners. It is because of this that those who share the mentality of the protesters typically depict capitalists as fat men, whose plates are heaped high with food, while the masses of wage earners must live near starvation. According to this mentality, the redistribution of wealth is a matter merely of taking from the overflowing plates of the capitalists and giving to the starving workers.

Contrary to such beliefs, in the modern world in which we actually live, the wealth of the capitalists is simply not in the form of consumers' goods to any great extent. Not only is it overwhelmingly in the form of means of production but those means of production are employed in the production of goods and services that are sold in the market. Totally unlike the conditions of self-sufficient farm families, the physical beneficiaries of the capitalists' means of production are all the members of the general consuming public who buy the capitalists' products.

Read On . . .

Peter Schiff's Visit to Occupy Wall Street

I think Schiff has been an awesome apologist for free-market Capitalism these past 10 years.

Here's the Anderson Cooper clip of his visit to OWS:

http://ac360.blogs.cnn.com/2011/10/27/video-wall-street-ceo-takes-on-occupiers/

Schiff is right when he says we should blame the gov for distorting markets and being the primary cause of the crisis, not Capitalism itself. The other guy makes a good point that it was "Wall Street" that pressured the gov to do so. But Schiff's counter-point at the end of the clip is even better and gets to the core. I'll take it one step further and say that the main way things get out of control like they have is when gov takes control of the currency and centrally plans/controls banking and interest rates.

Check out this prescient cartoon from 1912 (1 year before the establishment of the federal reserve):



Throughout history, people in power, be it kings/queens, politicians, military leaders, etc have all used currency debasement to steal from everyone else and then use the stolen purchasing power to finance wars, empire building, vote buying and general megalomania. Business leaders also participate by getting in bed with the politicians, funding/manipulating them to their own benefit and/or simply becoming politicians themselves.

Vanity Fair: California and Bust by Michael Lewis

The smart money says the U.S. economy will splinter, with some states thriving, some states not, and all eyes are on California as the nightmare scenario. After a hair-raising visit with former governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, who explains why the Golden State has cratered, Michael Lewis goes where the buck literally stops—the local level, where the likes of San Jose mayor Chuck Reed and Vallejo fire chief Paige Meyer are trying to avert even worse catastrophes and rethink what it means to be a society.

Read on . . .

WSJ: Blame the Fed for the Financial Crisis by Ron Paul

The Fed fails to grasp that an interest rate is a price, the price of time. Attempting to manipulate that price is as destructive as any other government price control.

To know what is wrong with the Federal Reserve, one must first understand the nature of money. Money is like any other good in our economy that emerges from the market to satisfy the needs and wants of consumers. Its particular usefulness is that it helps facilitate indirect exchange, making it easier for us to buy and sell goods because there is a common way of measuring their value. Money is not a government phenomenon, and it need not and should not be managed by government. When central banks like the Fed manage money they are engaging in price fixing, which leads not to prosperity but to disaster.

Read on . . .

Debt Collapse - $20,000 Gold

MSNBC on NYPD Police Brutality during Occupy Wall Street Lawrence O'donnell with "The Last Word"

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zgr3DiqWYCI&sns=em

Recent FB Posts

http://www.thedailyshow.com/watch/mon-august-15-2011/indecision-2012---corn-polled-edition---ron-paul---the-top-tier?xrs=share_copy

Gold reaches its inflation adjusted high in Asian Trading

Trader Dan's Market Views: Gold reaches its inflation adjusted high in Asian Trading ...: "The following chart is more for informative purposes than for trading but I did want to note that using the Federal Government's CPI data . . ."

Floor Speech on Debt Ceiling July 19 2011

Check out this video on YouTube:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xqfm0zrRs9Q&feature=youtube_gdata_player

-Mark

Federer in the top 4 highest paid athletes

Offside: A Sports Law Blog: Forbes: Top Paid Athletes - Woods, Kobe & LeBron: "According to Forbes, over the past 12 months, the top paid athlete is Tiger Woods at $75 million. Despite losing Gillette, AT&T and PepsiCo ..."

Is Right and Wrong determined Democratically?