Some Gold Pieces Are Worth More Than Others

The following story about the 1933 Double Eagle gold coin is from Bloomberg Business Week. Don't you wish you had a coin worth $7.6 million dollars? Reads like great fiction...but it's true! The most valuable coin in the world sits in the lobby of the...

Funding US Debt with the Mother of All Garage Sales?

Every once in a while we come across a story so ludicrous we simply can't pass it by. The following comes to us from BusinessInsider.com and was written by Joe Weisenthal (or his pet monkey), who is either the ultimate contrarian, bomb thrower, or simply a...

Justice Department Questions S&P Credit Ratings

Is the United States Department of Justice (DOJ) trying to bring down the S&P credit rating agency as a retaliatory measure? Maybe they are and maybe they aren't but the timing of the news about an official investigation of the agency is certainly curious,...

Budget Control Agreement of 2011 (The Short Version)

<img class="alignleft size-full wp-image-798" title="3135433564_b0510e24d3_m" src="https://americanmonetaryassociation.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/15/2011/08/3135433564_b0510e24d3_m.jpg" alt="" width="240" height="174" />In case you have a severe case of insomnia, you can read the entire 74 page text of the <a href="http://s3.documentcloud.org/documents/228727/debt-bill.pdf " target="_blank">Budget Control Agreement of 2011 here</a>. Note we're not saying you SHOULD read it, only that you can if you so choose. Unless you've been prospecting on the far side of Mars for most of the year, you're probably aware that there has been something of an impasse between congress and the president for most of the year. The sides were long ago staked out. Fiscal conservatives didn't want to raise the debt ceiling without a plan in place to cut America's spend happy ways. Fiscal "progressives" wanted to raise the debt ceiling, raise taxes, and raise the odds that our economy would implode in a cloud of credit rating downgrading.