I spent a little time at Jekyll Island, Georgia, last weekend. I looked hard, but I didn’t find the mythical creature from Jekyll Island. From what I hear, it’s taken up permanent residence in Washington D.C. But I did locate its birthplace.
If you don’t get the reference, I’m referring to the Federal Reserve.
If you have ever handled gold leaf, you know it’s pretty thin. Paper-thin, in fact. But did you know we can go thinner?
In fact, scientists can take gold and silver into two dimensions. Sounds crazy, eh? Like flat earth or something. But the research team of Ulrich Starke and his former doctoral student Stiven Forti have successfully created a gold layer only a single atom thick. It’s two-dimensional gold, so to speak.
I have a love-hate relationship with social media.
On the one hand, I now have a number of really close friends that I would have never met without Facebook. I’m talking people I connected with on the social media platform and now hang out with in real life. It’s pretty amazing to be able to interact with like-minded people across the US, and even around the world.
For most of us, these government-enforced coronavirus economic shutdowns have been pretty miserable. I don’t think too many of us feel like we’re overall better off today than we were a couple of months ago – unless maybe you’re in the toilet paper business. Even if they haven’t impacted our pocketbooks, the lockdowns have taken a toll on our psyches. I didn’t like being told to stay inside when I was 10. I don’t like it any better today.
But speaking of 10-year-olds, a couple of young boys in France parlayed the lockdown into big bucks.
The money supply growth rate surged to an all-time high in April as the Federal Reserve created cash at an unprecedented rate through quantitative easing and other money-creating monetary policies.
According to Ryan McMaken at the Mises Institute, the only time the Fed has come close to this level of money creation was in the 1970s – the era of stagflation.
I know a lot of you come to Fun on Friday for the advice.
Well, here are your words of wisdom for today – never read the comments.
It will really help your sanity.
Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell went negative in a webcast speech on Wednesday, May 13.
I’m not talking about negative interest rates, although that could be coming down the pike as well. Powell went negative on the prospects of a quick economic recovery.
He’s right about the prospects for the economy, but he’s wrong about the solution. That’s because he doesn’t even realize it’s Fed policy at the root of the problem to begin with.
Are negative interest rates in our future?
The markets are starting to think so.
On Thursday, Fed fund futures contracts began pricing in negative interest rates. They were initially priced in for December but then shifted to early 2021. This doesn’t guarantee negative rates, but it does indicate markets are beginning to expect them.
I have some advice for you wanna-be scammers out there.
Check your mailing list.
A scammer in British Columbia sent his pitch to a cop – a member of the Delta police economic and technical crime unit to be exact.
