The “Cyprus deal” as it has been widely referred to in the media may mark the next to last act in the the slow motion collapse of fractional-reserve banking that began with the implosion of the savings-and-loan industry in the U.S. in the late 1980s.

This trend continued with the currency crises in Russia, Mexico, East Asia, and Argentina in the 1990s in which fractional-reserve banking played a decisive role. The unraveling of fractional-reserve banking became visible even to the average depositor during the financial meltdown of 2008 that ignited bank runs on some of the largest and most venerable financial institutions in the world. The final collapse was only averted by the multi-trillion dollar bailout of U.S. and foreign banks by the Federal Reserve.

Even more than the unprecedented financial crisis of 2008, however, recent events in Cyprus may have struck the mortal blow to fractional-reserve banking. For fractional-reserve banking can only exist for as long as the depositors have complete confidence that regardless of the financial woes that befall the bank entrusted with their “deposits,” they will always be able to withdraw them on demand at par in currency, the ultimate cash of any banking system.

Ever since World War Two governmental deposit insurance, backed up by the money-creating powers of the central bank, was seen as the unshakable guarantee that warranted such confidence. In effect, fractional-reserve banking was perceived as 100-percent banking by depositors, who acted as if their money was always “in the bank” thanks to the ability of central banks to conjure up money out of thin air (or in cyberspace).

CONTINUED at the Ludwig von Mises Institute.

This week I attended the annual Craft Brewers Conference. This year’s conference, held in Washington, DC, occupied much of the District’s Convention Center, a massive space that reflects the continued growth of the craft beer movement in America.

In addition to sampling many excellent beers from around the country over several days, I sat in on a few educational sessions and spoke with several well-known brewers from around the country to gauge the state of the industry.

While demand for craft beer is growing across the country, it appears many small brewers are also bumping up against outdated federal and state regulations.

State laws regulating breweries vary greatly. The trend, as I’ve noted previously, appears largely—though not universally—to be toward deregulation.

CONTINUED at Reason. Written by Baylen Linnekin.

Only retiring Democrat Gary Ackerman of New York was more generous with public money, barely topping Akin’s 98 percent increase in pay, the website shows. Allen West, a Tea Party favorite from South Florida, was the fourth biggest giver of taxpayer bonuses after he lost reelection to Rep. Patrick Murphy (D-Fla.). Rep. Chip Cravaack (R-Minn.) was the third most generous, according to LegiStorm.

West and Akin routinely decried wasteful and out-of-control government spending, calling for major cuts to social programs.

Of the top 10 members of Congress most generous with year-end bonuses, nine were Republicans, and 14 of the top 20 were, not coincidentally, on their way out of the House.

Republican Reps. Devin Nunes (Calif.), Steve Austria (Ohio), Steve LaTourette (Ohio), Bob Turner (N.Y.), Roscoe Bartlett (Md.) and Jon Runyan (N.J.) rounded out the top 10 in 2012.

When Democrats lost a historic number of seats in 2010, outgoing members of the party lavished their staff with unspent money, with 18 of the top 20 givers carrying a D next to their name.

House staffers typically get bonuses at the end of the year depending on how much is left in the office budget, but on average in 2012 those bumps were just 16.4 percent for Republicans and 15.1 percent for Democrats. Bonuses are not labeled as such in the congressional books, but LegiStorm is able to count them by comparing the increase in reported salary in the fourth quarter to the average of the first three quarters.

Source: the Huffington Post.

According to a computer simulation by Valery Rashkov and Piero Madau at UC Santa Cruz, a shocking number of these abandoned black holes might be found in the Milky Way’s halo, which is a giant outlying region of gas found beyond our galaxy’s stars. There’s considerable variance in terms of just how many black holes are out there — Rashkov and Madau place the number of black holes between as low as 70 and and as high as 2,000.

These objects are what the researchers refer to as “seed” black holes. These intermediate-sized black holes were once found at the center of early collections of stars and gas — these structures weren’t big enough to be considered galaxies in their own right, but they combined as the building blocks for galaxies like the Milky Way. While a good number of these original, relatively small black holes would have merged together to form the current crop of supermassive black holes, but the chaos of these intergalactic mergers could have left some of the black holes stranded in the far regions of space.

While most of these rogue black holes would be pretty much impossible to detect, some of them might have brought entire star clusters and clumps of dark matter along with them. If that’s the case, we should be able to spot the light of those clusters in the Milky Way’s halo. For more, check out New Scientist and the original paper atarXiv.

In lieu of a story-specific image, enjoy the above artist’s conception of the IC 10 X-1 system, with the black hole in the upper left. Credit: Aurore Simonnet/Sonoma State University/NASA.

Source: io9. Written by Alasdair Wilkins.