Palladium prices are up 74% this year and platinum is up a couple hundred bucks an ounce from a year ago. So Catalytic converter thefts are on the rise.

“It takes about five minutes and you make 100 bucks,” said Det. Tim Yancey with the Henry County (Georgia) Police Department. Thieves slide under the car, make two cuts with a battery-powered saw and roll away with platinum and Palladium in hand.

Agora Financial’s “5 minute Forecast” surveyed recent news items and found,

Five thefts this month in the Chicago suburb of Oak Park

[Excerpted from The Causes of the Economic Crisis]

Five years ago, in November 2005, the Federal Reserve announced that it would no longer be tracking the aggregate money supply. It issued a terse, cryptic 143-word press release entitled the “Discontinuance of M3.” M3 was the broadest member of the big 4 of monetary aggregates published by the Fed — M0, M1, M2, and M3 that the Fed had compiled monthly since 1959.

This topic needs no introduction. We hear discussions in the national media weekly about the possible threat an economically resurgent China poses to the United States — and even to other countries. So how concerned should we really be about China’s economic and military might? Answer: China’s economic development itself is not in any way harmful to us; ultimately, the only threats that exist as a result of its success come from potential actions taken by politicians as a response to its development.

Sunday’s New York Times carries an article titled “The Blur Between Spending and Taxes.” The author is Harvard Professor N. Gregory Mankiw.1 The essential theme of the article is that the government is spending when it decides to forgo tax revenue that it otherwise could have collected.

As many readers doubtless already know, David Nolan, a founder of the Libertarian Party, died yesterday in Tucson, Arizona. He was on the side of the angels, so to speak, on the issues so many of us care about. He was also a model of civility: he could disagree with others without purging or smearing them — a vanishing quality in our world. I’ve been pleased to see so many tributes (particularly on Facebook) by young people who were inspired by him.

NPR echos a sense reported everywhere: people have changed travel plans in light of the TSA’s ghastly attacks on airline customers. We’ll know more next week but the result could be financially disastrous for airlines (and then comes nationalization and then etc.).