How to Avoid the NYTimes New PayWall, Mid-East Learns from Fed, Graph on New Euro Bank Stress Test, and Pepsi Goes Green

Today begins a new era as the New York Times starts limiting IP addresses to 20 articles a month unless you become a paying subscriber.  I foresee this move being disastrous for a paper that is already losing viewership and influence.  You can't expect people who have received something free for so long to begin paying.  Though the NYT will still maintain its reputation as a premier news outlet, competitors such as the Wall Street Journal and New York Post stand to make huge gains in market share.  Though it's disappointing, the only things I really read on NYT are Krugman's column and blog.  I sometimes read Thomas Friedman, Bob Herbert, and Maureen Dowd for the occasional laugh (Friedman and Herbert for their ignorance, but Dowd for her humor).

Never fear though, here is the link to seven ways to avoid the paywall from Business Insider.  Don't expect all of these solutions to last long before they are fixed though.

One of the most absurd things in the history of central banking occurred last week.  Apparently Libyan rebels have formed their own central bank headquartered in Benghazi along with their own national oil company.  From Bloomberg:

The Transitional National Council released a statement announcing the decision made at a March 19 meeting to establish the “Libyan Oil Company as supervisory authority on oil production and policies in the country, based temporarily in Benghazi, and the appointment of an interim director general” of the company.
The Council also said it “designated the Central Bank of Benghazi as a monetary authority competent in monetary policies in Libya and the appointment of a governor to the Central Bank of Libya, with a temporary headquarters in Benghazi.”

Yearning for freedom?  More like replacing the machine gun with another printing press. Maybe they should look to Afghanistan to see how "real" central banking is done.  From the NYT:

When a brother and nephew of an Afghan vice president wanted to build up their fuel transport business, they took out a $19 million loan from Kabul Bank. When a brother of the president wanted to invest in a cement factory, he took out a $2.9 million loan; he also took out $6 million for a town house in Dubai. When the bank’s chief executive wanted to invest in newly built apartments in Kabul, he took almost $18 million. 

The terms were hard to beat: no collateral, little or no interest. And no repayment due date.

Those are just a few of the loans detailed in a damning internal report by Afghanistan’s own Central Bank, which depicts the Afghan political elite as using Kabul Bank, the country’s biggest financial institution, as their private piggy bank.

This is what Libyan rebels want? The national oil company is not a new concept unfortunately.  Apparently Gaddafi suggested it in a speech to Georgetown University students in 2009.  From EPJ:

On Wednesday Libya's President Muammar Gaddafi made a bad week for ConocoPhillips even worse. Talking with Georgetown University students via satellite, he said, according to Reuters, that oil prices ($43/barrel Wednesday) were "unbearable" and that Libyan oil "maybe should be owned by national companies or the public sector at this point, in order to control the oil prices, the oil production or maybe to stop it."

You would think with all indicators pointing to a collapse in central banking, it would be the last thing Libyan rebels would want.  Here is just another indicator from a survey respondent in food manufacturing on the Dallas Fed's new diffusion index:

"Prices are high, which makes for lower volume. The supply of cattle is limited. The cost of grain for livestock is unusually high because of high corn prices, partly attributable  to ethanol subsidies. All of our raw material costs are at record highs. The cost of diesel also hurts us. A weak dollar is not good for us."

The pain is starting to be felt.  Just look at how inflation expectations are leading to rise in consumer spending and a decline in the savings rate.  From Reuters:

U.S. consumer spending rose slightly more than expected in February for the eighth straight month of gains as households tapped their savings, government data showed on Monday, while inflation accelerated at its fastest pace since June 2009.  

The Commerce Department said spending rose 0.7 percent after an upwardly revised 0.3 percent gain in January.

From Zerohedge:

Personal saving as a percentage of disposable personal income was 5.8 percent in February, compared with 6.1 percent in January.

Seth Lipsky, founding editor of the New York Sun, does a fantastic job pointing out the fallacies of a floating dollar (a dollar not tied to anything like gold) in a speech he gave to Hillsdale College back in February in a rather comical way:

Or let us consider a compromise. Let’s go to a fiat kilogram—that is, permit the kilogram to float—but apply the new urgency to fixing the dollar at a specified number of grains of gold. To those who say it would be ridiculous to fix the dollar but let the butcher hand you whatever amount of hamburger he wants when you ask for a kilogram, I say, what’s the difference as to whether it’s the measure of money or of weight that floats?
For that matter, one could go all the way and fix the value of both the kilogram and the dollar but float the value of time. You say you want to be paid $100 an hour. That’s fine by your boss. But he—or Chairman Bernanke—gets to decide how many minutes in the hour. Or how long the minute is. You know you’ll get a kilogram of meat for the price a kilogram of meat costs. But you won’t know how long you have to work to earn the money.

This speech was based on this great editorial from a few weeks ago.  Still, there is no need for a gold backed dollar with those all-seeing regulators at the helm to control the supposed excesses of capitalism, right?  It's time for another dog-and-pony show of a banking stress test by the European Banking Authority.  This test is infamous for its conclusion that Ireland banks were solvent four months before their collapse and subsequent bailout.  Here is a pretty good chart from Zerohedge showing the 2010 failed results:

I will end with another great example of how free market capitalism is capable of producing green technology without government encouragement.  From SlashFood:

New Pepsi Bottle Is 100 Percent Plant-Based

Earth Day may not be for another month, but the folks at PepsiCo are celebrating early. The company has just announced that it has developed the world's first 100-percent plant-based PET bottle.

PepsiCo's new bottle uses no petroleum but instead a medley of "bio-based raw materials," such as switch grass, pine bark and corn husks. The company says that it expects to incorporate agricultural byproducts from its other operations in the production of the bottles, such as orange peels from all that Tropicana OJ PepsiCo squeezes each year.

Funny how consumer demand works huh?