Today it was announced that the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) had a material weakness in the internal controls over its financial reporting.

Every libertarian should support full freedom in money production and use, and a great step toward sound money would be to scrap all laws against alternative currencies. I find it interesting how insistent the government is that we use its currency and no other: what is it that these people fear? So there is no libertarian grounds for prosecuting any company that is minting currency. Private coinage grew up with capitalism itself.

For those who have been speculating on how the government might bail out participants in the collapsing US subprime mortgage market, John Paul Koning writes that an unlikely savior has stepped forward: the Federal Home Loan Banks (FHLB), established in the midst of the Great Depression to provide a stable source of funding for member thrifts, otherwise known as savings & loan associations.

Here’s a first for me: the female half of a couple seeking to emigrate from the UK to New Zealand is barred from joining her husband who’s already there (Jack Sprat, I suppose) because she’s obese. From this article, one infers that they might let her in if she slims down (if you can pass between the sensors . . .), and who’s to care what she does after that? This is just another example of the twin evils of: (a) socialized medical care; and (b) immigration control at national borders.

Re-nationalization, high tariffs, Keynesian monetary and fiscal “policy”, and all the U.N.’s CEPAL recipe for disaster is back in Venezuela, Bolivia, Nicaragua and Ecuador. Having to say a lot on the subject, let me just begin with Hugo Chavez’s proposal for an expiring, voucher-based currency.