Banks are intermediaries, and it's the business of the internet to eliminate unnecessay ones.  Thus a friend of mine observes:

What Lending Club and other P2P lenders do is provide an online market-place that connects borrowers and lenders directly; think the eBay of loans and you have the right conceptual grasp. Moreover, the business model of online market-place lending breaks with a banking tradition, dating back to 14th century Florence, of operating on a 'fractional reserve' basis. 

Do you know why the U.S. economy shrank almost 3 percent in the first quarter of this year?

When the news of the dreadful gross domestic product (GDP) number came out last week, many were surprised, but none were more surprised than the folks in the Obama administration. Many of their supporters had been saying this was the year of a real economic recovery.

The quick reaction was to blame the bad GDP numbers on the cold weather.  It is rather ironic that the president blames the bad economy on the cold weather, while at the same time he is running around the country saying we have to spend many more tax dollars to prevent warmer weather a hundred years from now.

But get ready for much worse economic weather.  Today, July 1, the administration implements perhaps the most stupid and destructive piece of tax regulation ever devised - the Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act (FATCA).

This one regulation by itself may well cause another drop in GDP during the third quarter of this year.  The Disaster of FATCA has begun.

The Democrat Party is in thrall, we're told, of the mighty power of the Moonbat Left, with its millions of passionate adherents all ruthlessly organized via MoveOn.org to bring doom to any politician who dares oppose them.

Their strength would literally be on parade, they boasted, in the nation's capital in a glorious resurrection of the left's finest moment of anti-war protest forty years ago.   More than a hundred thousand of them would march on the Pentagon, humbling their arrogant warmongering government over Iraq as their parents and grandparents once did over Vietnam.

Why they chose March 17, 2007 as the "40^th Anniversary" of the legendary-to-them March on the Pentagon is mysterious, as the latter took place on October 21, 1967.

On that October day 40 years ago, well over 100,000 lefties, cheered on by Jane Fonda, Noam Chomsky, and Abbie Hoffman, marched from the Lincoln Memorial over Memorial Bridge and down to the Pentagon, where they were met by 2,500 armed Army soldiers.

Lefty author Norman Mailer wrote a book about it, The Armies of the Night, which however poorly and egomaniacally written, won a Pulitzer Prize. 

No one, not even as awful a writer as Mailer, is going to write a book about the pathetic fizzle of this last Saturday.  What a bust.

Vladimir Putin has lost control of Russia's economy and may be forced to impose Soviet-style exchange controls after "shock and awe" action by the central bank failed to stem the collapse of the ruble.

"The situation is critical," said the central bank's vice-chairman, Sergei Shvetsov. "What is happening is a nightmare that we could not even have imagined a year ago."

The currency spiked from 71 to 98 against the euro yesterday (12/16) in the biggest one-day drop since the default crisis in 1998 as capital flight gathered pace, despite a drastic rise in interest rates to 17% the day before (12/15) intended to crush speculators and show resolve. It closed at 87, and at this writing today (12/17) is at 83.

Yields on two-year Russian bonds spiraled to 15.36%, while credit default swaps are pricing in a one-third chance of a sovereign default. The shares of Russia's biggest lender, Sberbank, fell 18%.

Neil Shearing, from Capital Economics, said the spectacular failure of the rate shock may bring matters to a head. "If a rise of 650 basis points won't do the job, we are near the end. That means stringent capital controls," he said.

In Washington, the White House said it had no intention of easing pressure on Russia to halt the freefall. "It is President Putin's decision to make. The aim is to sharpen the choice that he faces," said White House spokesman Josh Earnest yesterday.

After years of bluster and suggestions by Mr. Putin that the US is a paper tiger, the Kremlin is now coming face to face with the cataclysmic consequences of what it has done by invading Ukraine and changing Europe's borders by force.

The gullible give in to the government's global-warming myth

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"Wasting Resources on a potential threat ignores problems at hand."

Much of the media treat those who are skeptics about man-made global warming with the pejorative term "global-warming deniers," as if they were Holocaust deniers. Yet many of those in the media who watched presidential spokesperson Jay Carney engage in what can only politely be called "reality denial" day after day were-all-too silent about his obvious misstatements.

Reality deniers get away with many of their fibs because...