No ads, no remuneration. Die Gedanken sind wirklich frei. The tyrant "has desires which he is utterly unable to satisfy, and has more wants than any one, and is truly poor, if you know how to inspect the whole soul of him: all his life long he is beset with fear and is full of convulsions, and distractions, even as the State which he resembles."
Thursday, October 16, 2025
Sunday, October 5, 2025
Thursday, May 22, 2025
Monday, February 10, 2025
Literally the very last line in this story
Trump announces plan to stop making new pennies, citing production costs
In the U.S., discontinuing the penny entirely may require congressional approval.
The cash consumer will pay the cost of the Trump-Musk penny-elimination gambit: Is it the harbinger of a coming cashless tyranny?
![]() |
| "The Amish have been galvanised to head to the polls and turn the battle ground red." |
The little guy voted for Trump, so naturally Trump is going to screw the little guy, the Amish in particular.
And not mentioned in the story below is the deep resistance to eliminating cash among the denizens of America's survivalist communities. They see this as a control issue, and a potential threat to freedom because you control the cash in your pocket, but not the digital currency in your account. Cross the authorities somehow, and your account can be wiped out with a keystroke.
We already have experienced lawful gun owners and gun businesses being de-banked over gun ownership, among other culture war issues contested by liberal elites using economic coercion.
Meanwhile The UniParty has devalued the 1913 dollar to three cents. If you've only got one, eliminating the penny means you've now got bupkis.
How does the observation go? It's always the Republicans who actually advance the liberalism which the people resist when the Democrats are in control.
Every. Damn. Time.
To the extent rounding up occurs more frequently than rounding down, cash consumers would be paying the price for the cost efficiency Trump and Musk are seeking, said Ajay Patel, a professor of finance at Wake Forest University School of Business. ...
. . . people at the bottom of the economic ladder will probably feel the penny pinch the most.
“The individuals paying for this benefit will be those who purchase products and services using cash and will continue to do so going forward because they are either unbanked or unable to access debit or credit cards or a digital wallet,” Patel said. ...
Laura Maike, of Burton, Ohio, notes that the Amish will feel the pinch right now.
“Here in Northeast Ohio’s Amish country, we still use pennies regularly,” Maike said of her area, which includes thousands of generally cash-using Amish. “How would this work for cash-only transactions? It would be impossible to give exact change as the purchaser or seller.”
More.
Mad King Ludwig bans the penny
Congress has the exclusive power to coin money and regulate its value, not the president, according to the US Constitution.
But since all coin and currency is worthless, thanks to Congress, does it really matter anymore?
The thieving Roman emperors infamously diluted the value of coinage from time to time by reducing the amount of gold and silver contained in the coins.
Since we had real money once upon a time, our founders didn't want one man potentially messing with the money, so they put Congress in charge, because they really did think a president could become a tyrant.
But our perfect, holy founders who supposedly thought of everything never anticipated that the Congress itself would become the thieving bastards, the naifs.
The 1913 dollar is now worth three measly cents, but even that Mad King Ludwig will now take away.
If we were a free people, we wouldn't put up with this.
The principle remains, even if the circumstances have changed.
Trump takes aim at ‘wasteful’ government spending by ordering end to penny production
But at least one analyst on Wall Street expects that the penny’s days are numbered. TD Cowen’s Jaret Seiberg said the halt will [be] likely to pass judicial review, leading to a shortage in the coin.
“We believe this order would survive judicial review, which is why this is likely to occur,” Seiberg wrote on Monday. “We worry about this leading to a shortage of pennies, which could force merchants to pay banks more for coins. It also adds legal risk for merchants and banks. That could create the crisis needed to force Congress to act.”
Thursday, September 26, 2024
Kamala Harris dodges price controls question, Democrat hack Stephanie Ruhle is just fine with that
Stephanie Ruhle is the Democrat hack who was a cheerleader for the orgy of pandemic spending, which Biden's economic adviser Jared Bernstein (who famously can't explain the fiat money system) thanked her for, and who once opined that it was good enough for Kamala to say bread costs 50% more because that proves she's not avoiding the issue.
Monday, June 10, 2024
Sunday, February 4, 2024
This is your periodic reminder that the net worth of U.S. households is $151 trillion but there's only $2.3 trillion fiat currency in circulation anyway
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/TNWBSHNO
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CURRCIR
Meanwhile all the gold and silver in the world hardly close the gap:
Wednesday, August 23, 2023
Saturday, September 17, 2022
This is how America ends
One place at a time.
America and its free market capitalism depends on rules, a shared commitment to them and to their enforcement:
Sound money, not fiat money;
truth, not "my truth";
law and order, not one law for me and another for thee.
When you can't trust anybody anymore, it is over. People vote with their feet, as do corporations.
Crime, Homelessness, Taxes: Hollywood Big Shots Fleeing LA...
As Violent Crime in LA Rises, Demand for Private Security Among Wealthy Soars...
UPDATE: In Atlanta's Buckhead Neighborhood, Rising Crime Fuels Move to Secede...
AMAZON relocating workers from Seattle office due to crime...
DC WAWA closes amid ongoing shoplifting, violence...
WALGREENS closing more stores in San Fran due to organized theft...
Violence rises as employees fight back against shoplifters, thieves...
Chicago's Wealthy Neighborhoods Hire Private Police as Crime Rises...
Sunday, September 4, 2022
Money printing getting way ahead of output is the cause of the current inflation
US GDP last clocked in at $24.883 trillion in 2Q. The total public debt at the end of 2Q is $30.569 trillion.
That's now a mismatch of 123%, up from 105% in 2013, ten years ago, when the total public debt was $16.8 trillion and the GDP $16 trillion.
In other words, the debt has grown by 82% over the period while the GDP has grown by only 56%.
The debt represents spending money we do not have, and the increase in the debt represents the spending of more money we do not have. We simply create it out of thin air to facilitate the process. It doesn't matter what form it takes, whether in the form of Treasury securities or physical money.
Spending go whirr, Fed money machine go whirr, debt go whirr, and eventually inflation go whirr. Inflation is the payback for going into the debt for which we refused to pay at the time.
Debt draws forward prosperity . . .
But it should come as no surprise that the future we robbed has no prosperity in it, now that we have arrived there.
And people wonder where the inflation came from.
Inflation is always and everywhere a monetary phenomenon in the sense that it is and can be produced only by a more rapid increase in the quantity of money than in output.
Inflation trader squeals like a stuck pig, fears QT will soon lead to the sort of stock event you tell the grandchildren about
Well, we've heard that before, but this story about one of them perfectly describes how Fed money creation has ballooned, by design, to facilitate gains for those first in line for the money, the banksters, while the rest of us just get the inflation:
The Fed creates reserves as a special form of dollars that can only be held by banks and some similar firms, that they use to settle debts to each other. (The rest of us mostly use bank-created electronic money, plus physical dollars.) Since QE began, reserves have ballooned as the Fed created reserves to buy bonds from banks.
Unlike in 2017, large quantities of reserves have been returned to the central bank via money-market funds. These funds, which savers use as a liquid alternative to savings accounts, are allowed to deposit money at the Fed overnight using reverse repurchase agreements (RRPs), and have already sucked $2.2 trillion of reserves out of the system, up from zero at the start of last year.
For now, the loss of reserves isn’t a problem. Banks had too many deposits and reserves anyway, and they still have $3.3 trillion of reserves, more than they had ever held until last year.
More.
Inflation is always and everywhere a monetary phenomenon in the sense that it is and can be produced only by a more rapid increase in the quantity of money than in output.
Friday, July 29, 2022
America and its people have added over $12 trillion to their total credit market debt outstanding just since 2019, but that has done little but stall the decline of debt growth
The $90 trillion millstone: We did it to ourselves.
We are now in the future we tapped in the past for the prosperity of "debt draws forward prosperity", and there's little here to be found.
From 1946 to 2008 when we hit the debt growth iceberg, real GDP grew at a compound annual rate of 3.324%. Since then it has fallen 49%, to 1.68%.
We should have stayed with capitalism in the post-war, where one risks actual savings instead of future notional tax, income, and fiat money "revenues". But capitalism went out the window a long time ago, bringing with it the end of the gold standard, the creation of the Fed, and the introduction of the income tax, among other horribles.
Payback is a bitch, and what can't be paid back won't. The rest comes out of your hide.
Tuesday, May 10, 2022
All Items Consumer Price Index under Jerome Powell isn't capturing inflation like it did under Arthur F. Burns even though they both increased money supply at about the same rate
Currency in Circulation (CURRCIR) under Arthur F. Burns rose at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 8.64% from Feb 1970 to March 1978. The Consumer Price Index (CPIAUCSL) rose at a compound annual growth rate of 6.49%.
After four years of Jerome Powell, Feb 2018 to Feb 2022, Currency in Circulation rose at a similar 8.41% CAGR but the CPI only at 3.31% CAGR, almost 50% less than under Burns.
Milton Friedman famously said, “Inflation is always and everywhere a monetary phenomenon in the sense that it is and can be produced only by a more rapid increase in the quantity of money than in output.”
Something is rotten in CPI Denmark.
Wednesday, January 12, 2022
Thursday, November 25, 2021
Currency in Circulation is up over 24% Oct 2019 to Oct 2021 and people wonder why there is inflation
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CURRCIR
Tuesday, April 27, 2021
In the just 5 months since Joe Biden won the mail-in vote, the purchasing power of the dollar has already declined by 1.56%
The Great War, depression, gold confiscation, dollar devaluation, fiat money, More War, and inflationary monetary policy all have done a real number on the dollar long before this, so it's understandable if no one really notices anymore.
We're witnessing a seemingly infinite division in a race to the bottom.























