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Congrats to Mitt on Ohio. The inevitable candidate rolls on (you may win 20 states, but you don't have a real chance, Mr. Santorum).

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RP would also get much much more than 8% if he were the Republican candidate against Obama (or the Democratic candidate against Romney, for that matter). Indeed, I think there's a good chance he would win. He has far far more support than Nader ever had, so he shouldn't throw that away. Antagonizing the mainstream Republican Party isn't going to make them vote for libertarians next time.

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Who will avoid Ron Paul/similar candidates next time? The 8% of the country who are libertarians and support him? If Republicans aren't going to vote for him anyway, he has nothing to fear by pissing them off.

Yeah. RP has been getting consistently in the 10-20% range in reasonable states (i.e. not deep red social conservative states). If he tries to be Nader, expect that to drop off to far lower next time.

If nobody likes a Nader, are you implying that Kerry and Obama are more centrist than Al Gore? Because I'd probably dispute that.

I mean to look at Nader's votes. Way down in 2004. I don't think Nader had any impact on the selection of the Democratic nominee, all he accomplished was to get George Bush elected and to lower his own votes in the next election.

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Wow Romney totally beasted MA. He probably even got the majority of the votes before all the corruption/fraud!

Well Santorum and Gingrich may as well not have bothered in MA. No room for their brand of social conservative there. Indeed, very few people who even register as Republicans- it's like 50% independent to 40% Democrat to 10% Republican. Romney and Paul were the only viable options there, and Massachusetts is known for embracing big government, so no surprise Romney won big.

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There's absolutely a point.

"Attention Republican party. You will either meet libertarians halfway or you will never win another presidential election ever again."

You know that won't work right? Nobody likes a Nader, and people will summarily avoid Ron Paul/similar candidates next time.

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Also, there is one difference: supreme court justices.

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And also to know that blocking Romney for Obama is pointless and counterproductive, including to himself and future libertarian candidates.

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Ron Paul won't do that, Obama is still the other option.

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Good show for Ron Paul in Virginia. He finally broke 40% somewhere! That's reassuring to see, and proves he isn't just a fringe candidate.

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Short version: the US Dollar is now what gold used to be, the universal currency of the world. Since our government controls it, it's like our government has discovered the secrets of alchemy. If someone did discover alchemy, of course, the world would also abandon gold in the long run.

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I've been thinking about it, and I've decided that it's good for us to keep the dollar and not go on a gold standard for as long as the world will let us. The main problem with fiat money is that the government can print as much of it as they want. But as long the dollar is the reserve currency of the world, the currency all debt is denominated in, that's not a bad thing for us. We can always and easily honor our government debt simply by printing more dollars. It's sort of like having all the gold in the world in a gold standard world.

Now, eventually I expect other countries will stop using the USD as the reserve currency if our government does that. But until that day comes, we have nothing to lose by having the world reserve currency instead of being on equal footing with everyone else.

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Well at least the Santorum people know he's not winning! Looks like they're taking a stand on principle.

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And how do you tell which is which? Plenty of economic analysts are on record saying that as soon as the Fed says "okay guys no more QE" the dow is gonna fall by like 1,000 points on the spot.

Yes, that's what happened after the last two QE periods ended (well not on the spot but pretty quickly). If history repeats we'll see another 1,000-2,000 decline after Operation Twist ends in June.

You tell them apart by observation and thinking. If you want something more statistical you could start by comparing stock and gold prices, perhaps.

But the difficulty here, while relevant for investors, is irrelevant for a government that wants to manipulate markets by creating news to stay in power. Voters generally don't look at the stock market and then decide who they are going to vote for. They consider how good the economy is for them. By definition, that excludes the inflation expectations part. The stock prices are just a good gauge for people to look at to predict elections, it has no or very little causation effect.

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Literally quoted as saying he would have endorsed Obama if he would have asked him to.

Really, Bush wanted to endorse Obama?

Creating news is EASY for the government. Just order Bernanke to go out and declare that more money printing is coming. Market goes up. Repeat as necessary.

But that doesn't improve the underlying economy, which is what matters for winning votes. That only raises inflation expectations, which does raise stock prices, but doesn't make life better. The S&P is correlated to election results, it does not cause them. Specifically the part of the S&P that reflects the health of the economy is correlated to election results and the inflation expectations part is not.

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I'm not really sure why it should even matter. Wall Street is betting on both sides.

That's not the point. I'm replying to your contention that the smart money thinks Obama is more likely to win by pointing out that the "smart money" is nothing more than a reflection of the S&P 500. And it makes sense, because if the economy is doing well in November, Obama will win. If it is not he will lose. Indeed, the stock indices matter much less than the economy itself, and is even harder to manipulate to boot. Right now the election expectations are tracking the S&P because it is a good proxy for the health of the underlying economy.

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Government can manipulate the stock market in the short term in the exact same way that companies can manipulate earnings.

Well here the causation probably runs the other way: when the stock market is higher, people think Obama is more likely to win.

If you mean that the Obama administration can try to manipulate the market to make themselves win the general election, um.......look at the graph for the 2 months prior to the 2008 election? If Bush was manipulating that market to make sure McCain lost that election, he did a fantastic job.

Also, government cannot manipulate the stock market in the way that companies manipulate earnings, because the government doesn't control the prices of stocks. A company does control its costs and accounting measures, so it's easy to manipulate earnings. The only way to manipulate stock prices is either creating news or trading stocks. That's hard to do.

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I will estimate, if on election day (Obama vs. Romney)......

Dow 14,000+: 90% Obama victory
Dow 13,000-14,000: 65% Obama victory
Dow 12,000-13,000: 40% Obama victory
Dow 11,000-12,000: 30% Obama victory
Dow 10,000-11,000: 20% Obama victory
Dow 10,000-: 10% Obama Victory

I'll throw out 12,700 as a 50/50 point.

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Smart money disagrees.

http://www.intrade.com/v4/markets/contract/?contractId=743474

That chart tracks the S&P 500 extremely well. Obama shares go up when the stock market rises.

It's a good premise, I think. Ultimately this election is going to be about Obama, and his economic policies. Now where the S&P is going to be come November I don't know.

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Romney won't be able to win over libertarians OR social conservatives. He's gonna lose worse than McCain did.

McCain would do much better this year if he were the candidate again. Indeed he might be able to beat Obama this time around if not for the whole Sarah Palin debacle. (No Republican candidate could have won in 2008 except maybe Ron Paul).

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Also, Bush won 51-48 against Kerry in the popular vote, which is not really close for US politics. I suppose the electoral college was pretty close, but it wasn't in doubt.

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Maybe I'm missing something... but does Obama really need to sweat about any of the GOP candidates?

This feels like Kerry vs. Bush or something. It won't be as close as it might seem. BANK ON IT.

Bush v. Kerry with the Republican winning again? I'd rate the chance of Romney winning comfortably higher than Obama winning comfortably. Too many people dislike Obama.

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Or you can vote for Ron Paul and shock devalue the dollar to 10% of its value while making Smartmuffin and anyone else who owns gold rich. Is that what you want? Vote for quantitative easing for the inflation that brings us the redistribution and the hope and the change.

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Here's to Dow 100,000 and a six figure salary for everyone. These things can be yours if you continue to vote for the great Ben Bernanke.

Obama or Romney 2012.

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Paul takes 2nd place in Washington with 25%- excellent.

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Did that really happen?

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Well let's look at the similarities.

The ultimate goal of a corporation is to return value to its owners through dividends. The ultimate goal of the government is to return value to its owners (the people) through......services. Which means spending! The shareholders elect a board of directors to run the company. The owners of the government elect a Congress and President to run the government.

Now, the question is, are the people also customers of the government? And the answer is clearly no. Even if I am an Apple shareholder, that doesn't mean I have to ever buy one of their products. But with the government, I have to "buy" their product. So we are clearly not customers. But we are shareholders, and we receive progressively larger dividends every year through that spending.

The government is the ultimate corporation, a corporation that has a monopoly so strong that it can increase dividends every year even while constantly alienating customers. A company with credit so good that it can borrow money and immediately turn around and hand it out as dividends, because the lender believes the company will be able to borrow more money next year to pay off the loan. John D. Rockefeller would be jealous.

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To be fair, there are quite a few companies that increase their dividends every year and have done so for decades. Since the government views spending much like companies view dividends, perhaps we should say that it's been a huge success for the government.

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That's why you won't be elected as president. And why Ron Paul will not be elected as president.

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In other words, not going to happen.

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Balance the budget hahahahaha. We're lucky if the deficit doesn't go up every year.

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And they'll conclude the sky is not blue.

Meanwhile, the IPO system seems breathtakingly inefficient. YELP is up 65% right now from the pre-market opening IPO price which is only available to banks and their favored clients. This seems to happen the first day of the vast majority of IPOs. I wish companies should stop giving such a huge cut to the banks.

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On the Liberty Dollar case, it appears his problems were:

1. He minted coins (as opposed to issuing stock certificates like GLD or IAU).
2. He called his currency "dollars." (which is a stupid argument as loads of countries call their money some kind of dollar without representing it as USD, but the jury bought).

And yes, those restrictions are stupid. Why are coins any different from GLD stock? No difference! But that also means that it doesn't matter for us. If there's no difference, why do need one instead of the other? We don't, except to prove a point on principle.

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[This message was deleted at the request of the original poster]

The public can also assess the value of dollars or gold right now, by buying and selling gold. Please don't try to say that gold is worthless currently, or is not a competing currency.

There are other practical difficulties too, namely that gold still can't be carried around to buy things, so we still need a gold standard paper currency. And someone's gotta issue that currency. The more entities you have doing that, the less credible each of the currencies becomes. Having few or one entity issuing the gold currency has obvious problems.

Are stores even disallowed from accepting foreign currencies now? I was under the impression there are some stores by the Canadian border that do take CAD. Barter is similarly legal. As are contracts to exchange gold. If I walked into a store and offered them a contract in which I promised to deliver 2 ounces of gold within 7 days in exchange for their delivery of a big screen tv to my house within 7 days, I'm pretty sure they are allowed to accept.

It would be equally legal I believe if I exchanged GLD stock certificates for an item. So what exactly is illegal here? Fiat money by non-governments.

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And I dunno why you would want that kind of system. Having some stores that take gold directly literally does not help me one iota. It doesn't make any gold I could buy worth any more.

If you want it as a way of transitioning to a gold standard, yes, there's a chance it will do that (in the unlikely not not impossible possibility that the market equilibrium currency of convenience ends up being gold rather dollars). But if that's what you want, just advocate for a gold standard directly.

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If you can buy 11 gallons of gas with 1 ounce of silver, I think it MIGHT catch on just a little bit, don't you think?

Or I can buy $44 with 1 ounce of silver, and use that to buy gas.

If you do what you're proposing, within 3 years 99.9% of businesses are going to have prices only in dollars or only in gold (or rather, GLD shares or whatever lets people not carry physical gold around). It's just way more efficient not to constantly have to adjust prices.

So I'm saying the idea is moot because the market will not support this kind of "competing currency." Right now we already have competing currencies, and in sustainable form. You can go buy any fiat currency at the exchange, or precious metals.

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Nobody is going to bother using gold at the store though.

So you can allow it, and there's nothing wrong with that, but having a single currency at the counter is efficient. Highly efficient. We can trade currencies on the exchange.

Gold users also lose nothing because gold has plenty of value even if you can't use it directly at a store. Seriously. Do you think gold has value or not? If yes, buy it, if not, don't. You're perfectly free to do both. Who cares if you can use it at a store. Tons of stores don't take $100 bills either, and no one cares.

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Store gold in bank

Use credit card to buy with gold

SO COMPLICATED

But you can already do that.

The only difficulty is that your credit card is denominated in dollars, so you have to keep track of the exchange rate.

But that is way easier than the store constantly tracking the exchange rate. Do you expect them to post a price in dollars and a price in gold? They'll have to constantly be changing the stickers. Much easier for the consumer to just exchange gold for dollars once in a while.

If you mean we should have a gold standard, that is ONE currency, NOT TWO. With a gold standard there is no difference between dollars and gold.

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I should note: if you have physical gold or silver instead of an ETF, it's obviously more difficult. But it would also be more difficult if you owned physical euros or physical CHF, and those are currencies. And it's still a lot easier for you to exchange your metals once in a while than to have stores try to accept 2 currencies.

If stores are given the option of accepting 2 currencies, be warned that they'll probably charge you a premium for using gold/silver instead of USD. That's their only option against losing money to lost time. For example, stores in Switzerland in tourist towns often accept euros to accomodate tourists. But they don't waste time calculating the precise conversion rate, they round to save time. And of course, you always end up paying more if you pay in euros than if you had converted to CHF.

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I can buy a bunch of TVs or microwaves or something, sit on them for 5 years, then sell them back to get dollars.

But you'll get fewer dollars back. Those things don't hold their value. And they are illiquid, you don't know what price you'll get for them and it's difficult to do.

Precious metals are highly liquid, hold their value in the long run better than any fiat currency, and consistent enough in the short run (well maybe on the last one).

If you can't use it to pay for anything, it's not money.

And that doesn't matter. It doesn't matter if it takes you two steps to buy something instead of one when both of the steps are super easy.

By contrast, making stores accept precious metals in addition to USD would waste a ton of time. Can you imagine cashiers trying to figure out how much gold something costs? Weighing your gold while you and other customers wait? You might waste more time in one or two transactions that it would take you to sell some gold at your brokerage account and transfer the dollars over to your checking account each month.

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And if it's not a real currency, then it doesn't do anything at all to the current economic system. There is no reason for federal reserve dollars to change at all if silver is only valued in terms of federal reserve dollars. Any monetary transaction would still be regulated by the fed's prices.

The fed doesn't regulate prices, which is why we'd be getting inflation in the first place. The real value of a currency is how much it can buy in real goods. The fact that you have to click "sell" at your brokerage every month to get that month's USD to spend doesn't seem any more odious than say, using a credit card instead of cash.

It's a real currency if it controls how much things actually cost for you, which it does. It's also tradable on an international level, another test. You could sell your gold for euros, CHF, whatever, and spend it in those countries. Are dollars not a real currency because I have to convert them to euros to pay for things in Europe?


This is a kind of ridiculous statement. You don't solve inflation on an individual basis. You survive it or you protect yourself from it individually, sure, but that doesn't solve anything.

Oh? Why is inflation different from other things, which are generally better solved on an individual basis?

Many people do not consider inflation a problem, and are quite happy with the Fed's policies. If you have a problem with it, you have an easy out, in fact an out that will not only preserve the value of your assets, but make you a great deal of profit. If you don't have a problem with inflation, why do we need to protect you from it?


Also, as Dr. Paul mentioned, you have to pay capital gains taxes on them when you convert them back into dollars. What a joke.

True, and that's unfair. However, I daresay even with the 15% (or is it 28%, I think it might be 28% long term for precious metals, not sure), if we get hyperinflation, you're still going to turn a big profit in the amount of real goods you can buy.

*You'll turn a profit because currencies (such as precious metals) are speculative assets, and are always going to have future expectations priced into the price. Yes, gold is a speculative asset. As are all currencies. Things do NOT have a fair price in gold any more than they have a fair price in dollars or euros. The market decides.

People often seem to think that inflation destroys the amount of real goods a country can buy. That's called a recession, not inflation.

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Of course it is a competing currency. If I have to turn it back into USD, so what? I get more USD back than I put in. It's just a matter of convenience.

As for not solving inflation, it does for the people who care about inflation and believe it will happen.

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And Bernanke didn't want to say this publicly (he lets Obama say this in more appealing rhetoric) but this administration does not want people to save money. Their monetary policy has been to try to make people NOT save money.

The contradictory part is that their regulatory policy has been the opposite. Presumably to appease the people who think Wall Street banks caused all our problems and they can be fixed by regulating them.

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He didn't shut down Bernanke. I think Bernanke got the better of that argument actually (if you don't believe in the Federal Reserve, buy gold/silver/Canadian dollars/etc)

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You know, bubbles are good things. They create so much wealth out of thin air, it's amazing.

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Yeah, but accounting is obviously a field dealing with numbers. The data-backed stereotype has long been that women just can't do numbers as well as men, though I'm certain most bookkeepers, accountants, tax specialists, and CPAs emerging from the U.S. today are women. As sexist as it sounds, it does knock my ego down a peg. I'd probably carry a bit of concealed pride if I won my bread in something like actual mathematics or physics - a field most women simply can't do.

Whoa there, women can do math and physics! I admit I don't have any quantitative evidence to back this up, but my personal experience has been that women are equally naturally talented as men at math. However, they choose not to pursue math-based stuff from a young age because cultural expectations tell them that it is not for them.

Geography is probably a field where men are better than women. There is an extreme dearth of girls in the National Geographic Bee at least. Not like math/physics where it's perhaps 2 or 3 to 1, but like 95/5. And I don't think the cultural bias is nearly as strong there as with math either.

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Apparently Bernanke's son is studying to be a doctor and expects to accumulate $400,000 in student loan debt. I can imagine that his father is so used to working with billions and trillions that that much money probably seems like nothing at all. Same feeling poker players and Wall Street traders get about relatively small sums of money.

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Excellently. It's only a matter of time until the middle class is completely wiped out and the people live, work, and spend at the pleasure of our esteemed Federal Reserve, which we will finally be able to give its proper name, the Bank of the United States.

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(Paraphrasing)

Ron Paul: You say that it doesn't matter if we have inflation, unless you're stupid and hide your money in your mattress. But where are you going to put your money? In a CD that pays nothing?

What Bernanke probably wants to answer: Exactly. That's exactly the goal. To make it so that you cannot preserve the value of your money, so your best option is to spend it now. That is the stimulus. That is Keynesian theory. Spend all your money now, and we'll take care of you later by inflating the currency and giving you some.

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Wasn't accounting known as a man's profession?

Everything was known as a man's profession. Until it changed.

Today the most male-dominated educated profession is probably investment banking. And that's perhaps a profession where we could really use some more women, to stop the bravado groupthink.

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