Debt Zombie Haleynomics: Britain’s Buffett vs the Austrian Austerian

How the Information You Don’t Have Can Take Your Money

Anyone reading the title must think the writer believes he’s smart money. I confess to having been both, though not simultaneously. My purpose here is to show how dumb money can become smart money, because being at the wrong end of information asymmetry is the very definition of dumb money.

Giulio Andreotti, postwar Italy’s Machiavellian prince of power politics, coined this aphorism: “power exhausts only those who don’t have it.” Similarly, information can exhaust the finances of individual investors because they don’t know about the catalyst that institutional investors may…

When people repeatedly announce who they are in their own words, listen. The core of Nazi ideology is racial darwinism, the belief that humanity is divided into a hierarchy of inferior and superior races. For the umpteenth time last September 19 in Minnesota Trump advertised that he subscribes to this core belief of Nazism:

“President Trump’s riff about the “good genes” found among the people of Minnesota — an 80 percent white state — wasn’t a dog whistle. It was a train whistle, folding in Trump’s long-held belief that some people, himself especially, are simply born with superior traits to…

LBJ’s view: North Vietnam as another subject of “the Johnson Treatment” above.

Getting into Vietnam is a lot easier than getting out, even when just writing about it. Every time I thought this article was ready to publish, a new insight or source popped up, impeding definitive exit. My draft lottery number #96 from 1972 had returned.

In part 1 we saw how America’s quagmire building in Vietnam began with helping France’s failed restoration of colonial rule over Indochina from 1945–1954. After that failure, the US prevented free elections and led a division of Vietnam into North and South and its collision with post-colonial nationalism. This installed an elite clique kleptocracy regime…

Economic History Says No

An assortment of free market economists, EMH (efficient market hypothesis) fundamentalists, inflationist monetarists, crypto libertarians peddle the myth that government is a bumbling and incompetent misallocator of capital and that the private sector can always allocate capital more efficiently. This is historically illiterate because the simple facts of economic history of the last 200 years says so.

Ten examples of how the private sector is not always more efficient:

1. DARPA, which gave us the internet, was a public sector project. Throw in the GPS system in your smart phone, which is also public sector military tech. Facebook, Apple, Google…

Listen to the Quiet Part Shouted Out Loud

If you think voter ID laws have nothing to do with racism, you haven’t been listening to Republican leaders when they say the quiet part out loud with enough decibels for even the deaf to hear. If, after reading this, you still believe that voter ID laws have nothing to do with a white supremacist power grab, you’re ignoring American history and merit a diploma from the Kellyanne Conway School of Alternative Facts.

From the Godfather of the modern conservative movement, Paul Weyrich, co-founder of the Heritage Foundation and the American Legislative Exchange Council, which wants to return to state…

The real purpose of money: to buy yourself the ability to walk away from idiots who think they have power over you. Humphrey Bogart called it FY money. I call it walkaway money.

How to get to walkaway money? Save a high % of your income when your earning power is high and buy the cash generating assets that will pay you when your earning power--or desire to work--drops. Then adjust your appetites to your possibilities by living where it's easiest to do so. In Barcelona, the Mediterrenean San Francisco of Europe, you're affluent on 3000-4000 euros/month. In Riga on…