Like many of his Inca ancestors, Juan Apaza is possessed by gold. Descending into an icy tunnel 17,000 feet up in the Peruvian Andes, the 44-year-old miner stuffs a wad of coca leaves into his mouth to brace himself for the inevitable hunger and fatigue. For 30 days each month Apaza toils, without pay, deep inside this mine dug down under a glacier above the world's highest town, La Rinconada. For 30 days he faces the dangers that have killed many of his fellow miners—explosives, toxic gases, tunnel collapses—to extract the gold that the world demands.

http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/2009/01/gold/larmer-text

The president’s Office of Management and Budget — not that there really is a meaningful budget getting actual management — projects that the deficit for fiscal 2019, which begins in six weeks, will be $1.085 trillion. This is while the economy is, according to the economic historian in the Oval Office, “as good as it’s ever been, ever.”

Leavening administration euphoria with facts, Yale University’s Robert J. Shiller, writing in the New York Times, notes that since quarterly gross domestic product enumeration began in 1947, there have been 101 quarters with growth at least equal to the 4.1 percent of this year’s second quarter. The fastest — 13.4 percent — was 1950’s fourth quarter, perhaps produced largely by bad news: The Cold War was on, the Korean War had begun in June, and fear of the atomic bomb was rising (New York City installed its first air-raid siren in October), as was (consequently) a home-building boom outside cities and “scare buying” of products that might become scarce during World War III. Today, Shiller says, “it seems likely that people in many countries may be accelerating their purchases — of soybeans, steel and many other commodities — fearing future government intervention in the form of a trade war.” And fearing the probable: higher interest rates.

Read more:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/another-epic-economic-collapse-i...

All this is quite esoteric... It all depends of the proportion of people who are indebted to the eyeballs versus those who have a penny under their mattress. At this stage, it looks as if greed-on-credit has filled bank coffers while the ink is barely dry on the inflated printed dollars the government presses keep churning out like lollies and fairy-floss at the fair...