Market Watch invited Chris Mayer editor of Capital & Crisis and author of the World Right Side Up to discuss the subject. Chris said, “People have no idea how much water it takes to make, say, a pair of jeans,” adding that a pair of blue jeans will consume over 900 gallons of water in its lifetime, including everything from the water to irrigate the cotton crop to multiple washings of the jeans.

“Miners, food companies, tobacco companies and beverage makers all face pressure to use less water” with fresh water in short supply in many of the places they operate, such as India or China, he said. “This forces a re-examination of everything from favoring drought-resistant crops to creating new ways to sanitize things,” Mayer said. He goes on to recommend stock in a specific company that works in the world of water technologies.

Click Here to read the entire Market Watch article.

Lutz, who was in China 15 years ago, compares notes with Chris who’s been there several times in the past decade. Dominance of West is a recent thing. China used to have the largest economy pre-Industrial Revolution… it will again.

Talking heads fuel trade war fears that keep you from identifying the real opportunities in China. Chris identifies who’s going to fulfill China’s needs… all pieces of the puzzle he shares are tremendous investing themes.

Don’t be surprised that the longest chapter is actually on the USA. Mothballed plants are opening back up. Buick is THE status symbol brand in China… so there’s nothing to fear from the world “right side up.”

Finally, Chris gives examples of stocks no one heard of back in 2005, that are now big names (delivering big returns). That’s the idea when you learn to pay attention outside our borders. Getting in early is the key to making money in these markets.

Click here to view the embedded video.

He covers big themes in developing markets — emerging middle classes, MF Global’s collapse, Arab Spring, and governments around the globe. Find out why farmland could be the no. 1 investment and help you hedge your U.S. holdings.

Lyster covers questions like: Is Nicaragua a good place for your money? Is Dubai promising post-bust? Should I be worried about the dollar?- (The short answer is YES. Chris gives details on what to do.)

Click here to view the embedded video.

“I think that the most notable thing about reality has always been that we only really know for sure what’s going on now and we have a vague sense of what’s happened in the past… but one thing that has united all of humanity is that nobody knows for sure what’s coming tomorrow and to me that is very exciting. So within this world of uncertainty we have this possibility of reinventing everything day by day… along as there is some room for human volition and creativity to express itself, I think we have every reason to be extremely optimistic despite the attacks on human liberty that are going on all the time.”

For a complete version of the interview visit the The Voluntary Life website. To signup for Jeffery’s email newsletter visit Laissez-Faire Today.

“You’re paying more for gasoline because oil refiners are paying more for crude”, said Byron King. “Recent political and military tension with Iran has added a “war risk” premium to the markets, he said, “War is bad for business, but rumors of war are good for the oil business”.

“It doesn’t matter that the U.S. imports exactly zero Iranian oil,” King said. “The U.S. competes for oil with every other oil-importing nation and the tensions with Iran have set a higher price at the margin. The margin sets the price for everything else.” He continues, “Rumors drive prices upward, especially when it comes with fear of even a temporary closure of the Strait of Hormuz”.

To view the entire Fox Business News article click here.

Hydraulic Fracking or Hydro Fracking for short is now what has states in near panic, but as Byron King explains, this technological advent actually reduces the risk of environmental hazard. “When something new comes along, people don’t quite get it. It’s easy to put a lot of misinformation out there about it”, he says.

He quickly gives Hydro Fracking 101: “in the olden days, you would drill straight down into the rock formation, you would perforate the wells, blow some holes into the side of the well, and the gas, the hydro carbon, or oil drains to the well and out it comes. Well, that was the good old days. That’s what we call easy oil, even though back then the guys who did it didn’t think it was that easy.”

“We found all that… the oil that flows out of a rock into your drill pipe nice and easy… that’s gone, that’s history, you can forget about it, your grandfather, and your father—your mom and dad—they burned that oil up years ago. We’re in a new generation and the only way to get the large volumes of hydrocarbons out of the earth’s crust that the world needs to run is [through] advanced technology.”

“When I say its new technology, people have been doing it for 60-65 years. The idea has been around… the miracle of this technology is that we finally in the last 10 years or so broke the code on how it works”. He says later, “just now in 2012 is it starting to come online”, and “all of that money that was thrown during the 2000’s at this is paying off now”.

It’s too hard for the mainstream media to understand. “It takes more than their 15-20 second standup routine. This is just chemistry, there’s nothing political here, there’s no spin. It’s just physics and chemistry at work.”

“There are immense energy resources in the rocks of our continent, and many of those rocks are just plain off limits, and we have the existing infrastructure of things that could really help and enable that kind of development”.

He takes a good look at Alaska as an example. “The only areas that you can drill up there… are the areas that people have been drilling in for the past 34 years. And other areas have been off limits, like the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR)… have you ever been there? I’ve been there.”

“The industry has the technology to go out there and drill wells in the middle of winter, lay pipelines and such that have essentially no impact on the natural environment, and produce that oil, and keep using that Alaska pipeline. Right now… the volume of oil that comes out of the North Slope is so low that we’re actually fairly close to having to shut down if not decommission the Alaska pipeline. Now that would be terrible because you would go from about, say 400,000 barrels a day, if it gets down below about 350,000 barrels a day, they’re going to shut the pipeline down. So you don’t just go from 400,000 to 350 to 300 to 250 to 200; you go from 400,000, 350, 0. Boom. It’s gone. You shut the pipeline down.”

“There are about 250 to 300 people who are licensed to drive the Dalton highway, you’ve seen this kind of stuff on these TV shows… their good people and they know what they’re doing. When you drive up and down the Dalton highway, which I have done, and you look out the window of the vehicle, there’s not a speck of litter for 300 miles. So the time I was up there, I asked the head ranger, ‘how many people go to the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge every year?’ And in any given year, according to the US park service, about 5,000 people go to the ANWR. Those are registered visits. Of those 5000 people, about 3500 are government employees. So that means about 1500 non-government people visit the 213 every year, which tells me that here’s this area like the size of New Jersey… by putting this place off limits, we’ve turned it into this national park that nobody can go to”.

Click here for the full interview.

Insley contrasts this recent trend against the backdrop of a long-term perspective, and suggests that it may “signal a reemergence of the long-term trend” of silver in relation to gold. “The gold-to-silver ratio is close to 48, after hitting a high of over 80 in 2008”, he says.

“Silver prices could move higher in the weeks to come… and won’t likely see any demand-side destruction until they reach the $45 dollar range”.

He also reminds readers of a second major factor: the naturally occurring rate of silver. “Remember—the naturally occurring ratio of gold to silver in the earth’s crust is 17:1, so there’s still plenty of room for silver to move higher. I believe that’s where we’re headed,” he said.

“For the price of silver to meet that naturally occurring ratio today, we’d be looking at silver over $100 an ounce. That’s a 170% increase from today’s price of $37 an ounce,” Insley said.

Matt Insley’s comments and the entire MarketWatch article can be found here.

To shut down the Federal Reserve would impact each US citizen directly, host Lauren Lyster pointed out. Tucker stated that, yes, this would mean a short-term boost in interest rates, which could hurt those holding mortgages. However, it would also stop the central bank from robbing savers blind, as they have done for decades by keeping interest rates low.

“We live in a country where we pretend we love capitalism, we love free markets, we love free enterprise” Tucker said. “And yet we have this central planning apparatus that’s running our money and banking system.”

He added: “In 1913 they created the central bank, and look what’s happened since. The dollar is worth less than a nickel of what it was, business cycles have gotten worse, we’re more in debt… we’re making our problems worse now. Bernanke’s solutions are just stalling.”

Tucker also took sides with a recent speech by presidential candidate Ron Paul, though offered that Paul’s suggestion was not enough.

“Ron Paul is exactly right. I would only take out the qualifier,” Tucker said. “He says: ‘In due time [we’ll shut down the Federal Reserve].’ No, just do it today. If you’ve got a doctor poisoning his patient, you fire the guy. That’s what we’re dealing with. They’re going to keep pursuing the wrong solutions.”

As he has often suggested, Tucker then pointed to the private sector as a possible solution: “A lot of times government comes in and displaces the private sector. If the government stopped doing this, we’d see the private sector rush in and fix a large number of problems. Look at [the] unemployment numbers [released today]. This is catastrophic. We’re sacrificing an entire generation, and that’s cause directly in this case by a series of government regulations.”

Watch the exclusive interview is below, which begins at the 4-minute mark.

Jeffrey Tucker was a guest on Capital Account in December as well. Click here to see what solutions he has for getting you better health care and education.

Tucker is a frequent contributor to Whiskey & Gunpowder where recently he wrote on the problems of the Fed-managed paper dollar system and its impact on the average person.  Click here to read the article.

“The non-Chinese rare earth sector is not dying,” Byron told Sylvester. “In fact, the non-Chinese rare earth sector is established, and now it needs to survive. It needs to grow. It needs to prosper. The world cannot afford for the non-Chinese rare earth sector not to make it.”

“The rare earth space is at the point of separating out the stock promoters from the company builders and serious managers. The broad economy, and of course the stock market, needs company builders with strategic vision.”

Rare earths are, by definition, difficult to obtain. The conversation turned toward the ready supply of rare earth elements (REEs) and how companies are working with high demand.

Byron said, “It’s an unfortunate fact that the problematic supply situation and price spikes of the past two years or so caused an awful lot of research and development (R&D) for future applications to be defunded. Without assured supply, many companies don’t want to do R&D for applications that can’t get basic inputs.”

“At the same time, there’s a lot of talk about substituting or engineering around rare earths,” he added. “That is possible in some cases, but there are certain things for which the atomic properties of a given rare earth atom are utterly unique. People are not going to stop using rare earths in these kinds of apps. ”

There has been a spike in interest for graphite recently, which Byron has been tracking for his readers of Outstanding Investments and The Energy & Scarcity Investor. When asked to elaborate on ways that investors could break into the graphite market, he suggested:

“There are some niche companies that I [follow]. There are also some larger companies in the space such as Nippon Carbon Co. Ltd. (5302:JP), China Carbon Graphite Group Inc. (CHGI:OTCBB), SGL Group (SGLFF:OTCPK ) and others. One company that I just released out to my subscribers has been in the carbon business since 1886. They supplied graphite to the first reactor that Enrico Fermi built at the University of Chicago in 1942. They supplied the graphite that went into the Manhattan Project reactors at Oak Ridge, Tenn., and in Hanford, Wash. One-sixth of this company’s employees have a Ph.D. in physics or chemistry. This company is very high-tech, research-oriented, with lots of astonishing applications coming down the pipeline.”

To cash in on Byron’s big graphite play, click here for a special offer on Outstanding Investments.

Read the full interview with The Critical Metals Report.
More on Byron King.

The debate will focus on the legitimacy of the Federal Reserve Bank. Each debater will have 10 minutes to present their argument for or against it. Attendees of the event will learn how the Federal Reserve has functioned before, during and following economic crises; as well as how federal monetary policies affect citizens on an individual level.

“The actions – and inactions – of the Federal Reserve deeply impact the financial stability of our nation,” said Mr. Tucker. “I am looking forward to debating with Dean. This is a crucial topic, and Empire Unplugged will be the most interesting setting for a debate on federal monetary policy I have attended.”

“As with many policy debates, there really shouldn’t be a debate at all,” Tucker added. “That’s because, if you think about it, the idea of central banking makes no sense. If Dean says otherwise – and he is wrong – I will crush him.”

Mr. Baker responded: “The Federal Reserve’s failure to recognize the housing bubble and to take steps to counter it produced the disastrous economy we have today. However, things would be even worse right now if we didn’t have the Fed.”

Jeffrey Tucker is the author of several books including Bourbon for Breakfast: Living Outside the Statist Quo (2010), and It’s a Jetsons World: Private Miracles and Public Crimes (2011). Founded in 1972, Laissez-Faire Books is the nation’s leading Libertarian bookstore, publishing and distributing books on liberty, with a focus on economics and finance. The bookstore was acquired in 2010 by Baltimore-based research firm Agora Financial.

Dean Baker is the author of several books, including Taking Economics Seriously (2010) and The End of Loser Liberalism: Making Markets Progressive (2011). He is also the co-director of the Center for Economic Policy and Research inWashington,DC.

Empire Unplugged is a new salon show created to discuss the most controversial topics of our times. Live on-stage, guests speakers will tackle sacred cows and get to the meat of the matter, debating from both sides of the issue. At the end of each debate, the conversation is made open it up to the audience. Each salon is framed with Empire Unplugged theme music, after which a DJ takes over and the libations flow.

Empire Unplugged is located at the Montserrat House in Washington, DC (2016 9^th St. NW).