Uruguay becomes first nation to legalise marijuana trade … The Uruguayan government hopes legalising the sale of marijuana will tackle drug cartels … Uruguay's cannabis bill reflects liberal past … Uruguay has become the first country in the world to make it legal to grow, sell and consume marijuana. After nearly 12 hours of debate, senators gave the government-sponsored bill...Read More

Central banks lose $400bn in gold rout … Fall in gold price catches out central banks' fearful of repeating Gordon Brown's mistake of selling reserves at the bottom … Central banks, fearful of repeating Gordon Brown's mistake of selling the nation's gold reserves at the bottom of the market, have been caught out by the slide in prices this year, with the value of the pr...Read More

Rethinking the Idea of a Basic Income for All … In October, Swiss voters submitted sufficient signatures to put an initiative on the ballot that would pay every citizen of Switzerland $2,800 per month, no strings attached. Similar efforts are under way throughout Europe. And there is growing talk of establishing a basic income for Americans as well. Interestingly, support comes mainly from t...Read More

Single Payer Is Getting a Second Life as Obamacare Frustration Peaks … Could anger at the Obamacare rollout make Americans more receptive to a kind of Medicare-for-all system? That's what activists are hoping—and they're plotting a state-by-state fight. As the rollout of Obamacare clunks forward, activists who opposed the law from the beginning say it is time to seize the momen...Read More

US tax deal could prove deadly for small banks … US demands are "barely tolerable both economically and legally", according to Swiss Bankers Association chairman Patrick Odier … Valiant, Berner Kantonalbank and Vontobel are the first Swiss banks to have agreed to sign up to a United States tax declaration programme. Experts warn the associated legal costs of complying with th...Read More

Fed's Bullard Sees Higher QE Taper Odds as Labor Market Improves … Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis President James Bullard, a voter on policy this year, said an improving job market has increased the chances of a reduction in the Fed's bond purchases, and any cut should be modest because of too-low inflation. – BloombergDominant Social Theme: It's very complicated. It has...Read More

The west is losing faith in its own future … Living standards are even under pressure in countries that have done relatively well … American and European politicians like to talk about values and institutions. But for billions of people around the world, the crucial point is simpler and easier to grasp. The west is the part of the world where even ordinary people live comfortably. That...Read More

AOL, Twitter, Yahoo, Microsoft, Facebook, Google, Apple and LinkedIn to call for reforms to restore the public's trust in the Internet … AOL, Twitter, Yahoo, Microsoft, Facebook, Google, Apple and LinkedIn say: 'The balance in many countries has tipped too far in favour of the state and away from the rights of the individual.' The world's leading technology companies have uni...Read More

Bitcoins: A Fully-Compliant Currency The Government Can Love … All of bitcoin's benefits to the establishment revolve around its blockchain. In simple terms, a blockchain is a registry of all transactions carried out in bitcoins. Thus is resolved the problem of double-spending one particular bitcoin: It can't be done (at least in theory) due to the blockchain. But the blockchain is i...Read More

WTO overcomes last minute hitch to reach its first global trade deal … The World Trade Organization reached its first ever trade reform deal on Saturday to the roar of approval from nearly 160 ministers who had gathered on the Indonesian island of Bali to decide on the make-or-break agreement that could add $1 trillion to the global economy. The approval came after Cuba dropped a last-gasp t...Read More

The Coming Global Wealth Tax – Indebted governments may soon consider a big one-time levy on capital assets. Between ObamaCare, Iran and last quarter's uptick in U.S. economic growth, taxpayers these days may be distracted from several dangers to come. But households from the United States to Europe and Japan may soon face fiscal shocks worse than any market crash. The White House and Ne...Read More

Turley: Obama's "Become The Very Danger The Constitution Was Designed To Avoid" … REP. BOB GOODLATTE (R-VA): Professor Turley, the constitution, the system of separated powers is not simply about stopping one branch of government from usurping another. It's about protecting the liberty of Americans from the dangers of concentrated government power. How does the president...Read More

When progress trumps privacy … In 1890, two of America's leading legal minds, Louis Brandeis and Samuel Warren, published an article called "The Right to Privacy" in the Harvard Law Review. Scandalized by the rise of a gossip-mongering press that intruded on the lives of prominent citizens, they called upon the courts to recognize a "right to privacy." Their fear was...Read More

NSA tracking cellphone locations worldwide, Snowden documents show … The National Security Agency is gathering nearly 5 billion records a day on the whereabouts of cellphones around the world, according to top-secret documents and interviews with U.S. intelligence officials, enabling the agency to track the movements of individuals — and map their relationships — in ways that wou...Read More

Paul Krugman Consigns To Hell An Economic Slump Of His Own Devise … Public intellectual Paul Krugman recently consigned to Hell, in a New York Times op-ed column entitled A Permanent Slump, the world economy. He wrote: … "[W]hat if the world we've been living in for the past five years is the new normal? What if depression-like conditions are on track to persist, not for anoth...Read More

Ratted out: Scientific journal bows to Monsanto over anti-GMO study … Rigid criteria exist for a serious scientific journal to accept a peer-reviewed paper and to publish it. As well there exist strict criteria by which such an article can be withdrawn after publication. The Journal of Food and Chemical Toxicology has apparently decided to violate those procedures, announcing it is retractin...Read More

Fed unlikely to redraw markers for rate hike … Federal Reserve policymakers have cooled to the idea of explicitly raising the bar on future interest rate hikes, a sign the U.S. central bank is angling for a return to more subtle – and familiar – ways of explaining how it plans to steer the economy. The Fed, still struggling to boost the U.S. recovery from the Great Recession, rem...Read More

Edward Snowden revelations prompt … UN investigation into surveillance … UN's senior counter-terrorism official says revelations 'are at the very apex of public interest concerns' … The UN's senior counter-terrorism official is to launch an investigation into the surveillance powers of American and British intelligence agencies following Edward Snowden's revel...Read More

At the IMF Research Conference on November 8, 2013, former Treasury Secretary Larry Summers presented a plan to expand the con game. Summers says that it is not enough merely to give the banks interest free money. More should be done for the banks. Instead of being paid interest on their bank deposits, people should be penalized for keeping their money in banks instead of spending it. – Paul...Read More

Legendary investor Jim Rogers not only thinks Federal Reserve policy is incompetent, he thinks the entire institution should be eliminated. Asked by RT television network what he'd do if he was named chairman of the central bank, Rogers said, "I'd abolish the Federal Reserve, and then I'd resign." The world has survived just fine without central banks for most of its history,...Read More