Chris Hedges on NATO buildup that preceded Russia's invasion of Ukraine

NATO is building a missile base in Poland that's a hundred miles from the border with Russia.  We almost had a nuclear war over Soviet missiles in Cuba.  That's 90 miles from the coast of Florida.  I don't think Russia's fear and sense of betrayal...  I don't think any of that is unreasonable.  That's the tragedy.  That does again - I'm going to reiterate - not justify the war crime that they have committed and are committing in the Ukraine, but they had far more reason to be concerned than we did in Iraq where we just fabricated and lied and created weapons of mass destruction that didn't exist.

~ Chris Hedges, "Ukraine: Prelude to a War Crime," 16:00 mark, March 3, 2022

Jim Grant on margin of safety and possible repeat of 1973-74

The point to mark about 1973 [oil shock followed by recession and severe bear market] is not the risk that it literally repeats, but only to give unscripted events their due.  The central bankers haven’t feared them, much less prepared for them. Listening to the mandarins talk these past 10 years, one would suppose that they were in charge of the future. 

The idea of a margin of safety itself went out the window. It was no longer necessary, many came to reason, not in logistics, inventory management, geopolitics, pandemic medicine or investment-portfolio construction.

~ Jim Grant, "Break ball in a pool game," Grant's Interest Rate Observer, March 4, 2022

Jamie Dimon on banking restrictions following sanctions against Russia

I'm an American patriot and we're going to do what the American government tells us to do.

~ Jamie Dimon, Bloomberg interview, March 3, 2022

Kevin Duffy on the everything bubble

Meme stock madness was the umbrella on top of an all-encompassing cocktail served to far more than retail investors.  Central bankers, mainstream media, academia, Silicon Valley and the military industrial complex all imbibed from the same glass: a belief that government is the solution to all problems.  These institutions, drunk with power, formed twin personalities: enabler and disciplinarian, arsonist and fireman, gas-lighter and psychologist, social butterfly and censor, trouble-maker and policeman.  They created a new reality to justify their existence, but it was always a delusion. 

Morning comes soon enough.  The party was fun while it lasted, but tremendous damage was done.  The hangover is never pretty, but signifies a much needed, albeit unpleasant, return to health.  Likewise, bear markets and recessions have their place: They remove toxins, impart lessons, encourage productive behaviors and provide a path back to financial health.

~ Kevin Duffy, "The Hangover," The Coffee Can Portfolio, March 1, 2022

Murray Rothbard on collective security vs. neutrality

The collective-security concept that so enchanted the old (pre-1965) left sounded pretty good: Each nation-state was viewed as if it were an individual, so that when one state ‘aggressed against’ another, it became the duty of the governments of the world to step in and punish the ‘aggressor.’  In that way, the bitter and lengthy war in Korea became, in President Truman’s famous phrase, a ‘police action,’ needing no declaration of war but simply an executive decision by the world’s chief cop — the president of the United States — to be set into motion.  All other “law-abiding” nations and responsible organs of opinion were supposed to join in. 

The ‘isolationist’ right saw several grave flaws in this notion of collective security and the analogy between states and individuals.  One, of course, is that there is no world government or world cop, as there are national governments and police.  Each state has its own war-making machine, many of which are quite awesome.  When gangs of states wade into a conflict, they inexorably widen it.  Every tinpot controversy, the latest and most blatant being the fracas in the Falkland Islands, invites other nations to decide which of the states is ‘the aggressor’ and then leap in on the virtuous side.  Every local squabble thus threatens to escalate into a global conflagration. 

And since, according to collective security enthusiasts, the United States has apparently been divinely appointed to be the chief world policeman, it is thereby justified in throwing its massive weight into every controversy on the face of the globe. 

The other big problem with the collective-security analogy is that, in contrast to spotting thieves and muggers, it is generally difficult or even impossible to single out uniquely guilty parties in conflicts between states.  For although individuals have well-defined property rights that make someone else’s invasion of that property a culpable act of aggression, the boundary lines of each state have scarcely been arrived at by just and proper means.  Every state is born in, and exists by, coercion and aggression over its citizens and subjects, and its boundaries invariably have been determined by conquest and violence.  But in automatically condemning one state for crossing the borders of another, we are implicitly recognizing the validity of existing boundaries.  Why should the boundaries of a state in 1982 be any more or less just than they were in 1972, 1932, or 1872?  Why must they be automatically enshrined as sacred, so much so that a mere boundary crossing should lead every state in the world to force their citizens to kill or die? 

No, far better and wiser is the old classical liberal foreign policy of neutrality and nonintervention, a foreign policy set forth with great eloquence by Richard Cobden, John Bright, the Manchester school and other ‘little Englanders’ of the nineteenth century, by the Anti-Imperialist classical liberals of the turn of the twentieth century in Britain and the United States, and by the old right from the 1930s to the 1950s.  Neutrality limits conflicts instead of escalating them.  Neutral states cannot swell their power through war and militarism, or murder and plunder the citizens of other states.

~ Murray Rothbard

(Quoted by Lew Rockwell, "Keep US Out of War," February 28, 2022.)

Michael Rozeff on economic sanctions

Sanctions are wrong for the same reason that dropping a hydrogen bomb on Moscow would be wrong.  They target innocent people.  They are wrong for the same reason that attacking the Taliban government in Afghanistan was wrong, when bin Laden was the accused.  They are wrong for the same reason that attacking Iraq was wrong when Saddam Hussein was the accused target.  They are wrong for the same reason that bombing Libya was wrong when Gaddafi was the accused target.

~ Michael Rozeff, "The Theory of Economic Sanctions is Wrong," LewRockwell.com, March 14, 2014

(Quoted by Lew Rockwell, "Keep US Out of War," February 28, 2022.)

Nathan Meyer Rothschild on investing around wars

Buy when the cannons are firing and sell when the trumpets are blowing.

~ Nathan Meyer Rothschild