In its efforts to subjugate separatist areas of eastern Ukraine, the government Kiev has reinstated conscription. One would think that if the new regime in Kiev enjoyed widespread support, then volunteers would be flocking to the armed forces to carry out the state’s as-yet-unrealized fiats in the eastern region of the nation. Given that Russia has conscription also, I don’t mention this to single-out Ukraine, but to illustrate a more general point about how the necessity of conscription is helpful in exposing the true lack of support that a great many regimes enjoy.

Regarding the nasty GDP report for last quarter,  a Bloomberg reporter commented, “American consumers were a lone bright spot as households spent more to heat their homes and access health care.” In other words, if it were not for greater hardships that befell consumers, namely an unusually colder winter and a greater scarcity of health care,

The Donald Sterling affair is the latest step in the eroding of any sense of personal privacy in American society.  The owner of the ‘Los Angeles Clippers’ NBA team was taped in an argument with an alleged mistress, expressing his distaste for her posting online photos of herself with black men, or bringing them to basketball games for his team — this tape having been made without his knowledge or consent.  After the tape was leaked to the news media, and aired publicly, Sterling has

Writing in Forbes, Bill Bonner notes that “the financial scam that every American falls for” is the one in which politicians promise to improve economic outcomes using politics.

“Rare was the man,” he writes, “such as Robert Lucas or Murray Rothbard, who pointed out that you could not really improve economic results with political means.” He continues:

A follow up to Ryan’s excellent post.

Roger Garrison is at his best here balancing Fed policy and housing policy including CRA and their relative impact of the latest boom-bust. An excellent example of historical interpretation and “variations of the theme” of ABCT.

From his Alchemy Leveraged: The Federal Reserve and Modern Finance:

Newly-released memos from the Clinton presidential library reveal a little more about the scope of the Community Reinvestment Act (CRA) activities in the years leading up to the collapse of the housing bubble. For those unfamiliar with the home-loan industry, the Community Revinvestment Act was a 1977 act that “encourages” (with the threat of violence) banks and other lending institutions to make more home loans to low-income, non-white, and Hispanic households, and to reduce “redlining.”

The latest GDP report for the first quarter can be reviewed here.