STAFF NEWS & ANALYSIS
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December 18, 2015
History is funny and perhaps Hillary Clinton will win the presidency because at a Republican special committee on the Benghazi State Department tragedy she testified for 11 hours. The Committee is run by Trey Gowdy, seemingly one of Congress's more ethical and ...
December 17, 2015
Reuters samples lots of opinions in this post-rate hike article. First it sets up the sampling with a brief introduction. Then it begins to provide reactions. The first one is Mike Materasso, Senior Vice President & Co-Chair Fixed Income Policy Committee, Frank ...
December 17, 2015
New York Magazine's news and politics section provides us with this excerpt as part of a larger hagiography regarding Barack Obama and his address in the National Archives to new American citizens. The idea for Obama was to push back against the narrative that ...
December 16, 2015
Perhaps we ought to feel sorry for Fed officials, especially Ms. Yellen. We've read a lot about Janet Yellen's reluctant move toward a rate hike and she is certainly being cast as the Hamlet of Fed leaders, someone who is indecisive because she knows how much c ...
December 16, 2015
The New Yorker was a lot better when it published 50,000-word articles on wheat. This article, filled with adjectives about the mystifying appeal of Donald Trump and his loutish followers, is a kind of new low. It is so predictable that it kind of writes itself ...
December 15, 2015
This transcript from NPR features host David Greene interviewing David Wessel, director of the Hutchins Center at the Brookings Institution and a contributing correspondent to The Wall Street Journal. Wessel is fairly sanguine about the US economy. But in this ...
December 15, 2015
This Washington Post article provides us with a calm analysis of what's going on in French politics within the context of the French terror attacks. Written in a matter-of-fact style, it evaluates the electoral mood in France and provides us with a sober look a ...
December 14, 2015
As more and more incidents of terrorism afflict the West, we will probably see more articles like this one from Larry Kudlow, renouncing previous positions on immigration and calling for more severe actions. Fortunately, Ron Paul has just published a column tha ...
December 14, 2015
This interesting article is authored by well-known alternative-media author F. William Engdahl. We wrote about him here. Engdahl's article is persuasive, even though we have a slightly different point of view. He believes that the Saudi regime is trying to cont ...
December 11, 2015
The BBC is explaining why Switzerland will not offer bank secrecy anymore. It tells us that even the Swiss themselves do not believe in it anymore. First the United States put enormous pressure on Swiss finance and severely damaged Swiss private banking, which ...
December 11, 2015
The New York Post has recently published several articles blasting the corruption in New York state and using the trials of Dean Skelos and Sheldon Silver as examples of why the Albany political culture has to change. Certainly, the arguments by Skelos don't ad ...
December 10, 2015
The knives are out again for gold as Wall Street waits impatiently for the Federal Reserve to hike interest rates, thus strengthening the dollar, which – so we are told – will result in another tumble for gold against the mighty greenback. Of course, the ma ...
December 09, 2015
In this article, we will attempt to show the difference between an elite meme and a realistic, grounded, "human" analysis of the formal (accepted) profile of Brazil. There is the reality of Brazil (which is merely a construct on a map) and the reality of the pe ...
December 09, 2015
Gary North has written an interesting article entitled "Socialism Is Dead. Let's Move On. We Won" that incorporates his usual rigorous logic. It is posted at his website and also at LewRockwell.com. It is interesting because it provides an insight of which we w ...
December 08, 2015
The great asset-stripping continues. It doesn't make much sense, does it? Austerity, taxation and confiscation of assets are not providing Greece with a healthier economy. How could they? Is there a reason to continue to pound the Greeks? Well, perhaps so … A ...
December 08, 2015
We can see from this excerpt that the US medical establishment – aided by the mainstream media – is advancing the idea of flu vaccinations once again. The controversies over vaccines remain significant but you wouldn't know it from articles like this one. " ...
December 07, 2015
Long ago, we identified the idea that central banks could print money for everyone as perhaps the single most pernicious myth of our modern era because it gave the masses a further stake in a ruinous system. Central banking provides the beating heart of regulat ...
December 07, 2015
Ron Paul is out with his weekly column, entitled "Will the IRS Take Your Passport?" It deals with a bill that was just passed by Congress called the DRIVE Act. Over at GovTrack we find this: "H.R. 22: Developing a Reliable and Innovative Vision for the Economy ...
December 04, 2015
The consensus once again seems building that finally, this time, Yellen and company are going to hike. Her testimony to Congress yesterday seems to have sealed the proverbial deal. She spoke notably about "overshooting." "Were the FOMC to delay the start ... fo ...
December 04, 2015
Over at LewRockwell.com, Fred Reed has posted an insightful article on government responses to terrorism. Written from a libertarian standpoint, its main thesis is simple but often overlooked: Government cannot protect us from the consequences of its "long wars ...
December 03, 2015
It is incredible to us that anyone looking at the reality of the US economy could construe it as healthy, but obviously people do. MarketWatch tells us that in a speech on Wednesday, Yellen seemed to leave "little room for doubt" about a hike. Yes, Yellen is bu ...
December 03, 2015
Another horrible attack by armed gunmen against unarmed civilians. This one, once more in the US, has left a significant toll of wounded and dead – and was covered in detail by the major media on television and by the alternative media on the Internet. In fac ...
December 02, 2015
Once we were even more callow than we are now. Listening to a speech by Dennis Lockhart 15 or 20 years ago (see above excerpt), we probably would have been enormously impressed, thinking he sounded judicious, modest and yet at the same time almost infinitely wi ...
December 02, 2015
Do guns kill people, or do people kill people? We think it's the latter. It's the reason that the British are now suffering from a rash of murderous biting. Sorry, we just made that up, and, sure, it's nothing to joke about but it could be true. The Brits – l ...
December 01, 2015
It is popular in the Western media to bemoan the fall of the West and the rise of the East. Yet what we have here is peculiar: A Western-controlled institution, the International Monetary Fund, facilitating the ascent of China as a great monetary power despite ...
December 01, 2015
Little noted in the English media, French television reporters have recently been grilling officials who have confessed to running terror drills featuring a "mass shooting" on the morning of the Paris attacks. At the same time, libertarian politician Ron Paul h ...
November 30, 2015
You would think from the mainstream media analysis of what's going on in the European Union that nobody had foreseen this sort of migration. But as we and other alternative media outlets have pointed out, it's entirely predictable given the amount of violence a ...
November 30, 2015
This is a great public relations coup for the US Census Bureau, one of the more invasive of US agencies and thus a department that is always thinking of ways to better its image. And what better way than to officially recognize a "language" spoken by non-white ...
November 27, 2015
This CNN article is basically a recap of the accepted Middle East narrative as it now stands. What's going on in the Middle East increasingly resembles – on the surface – an evolution of the "great game" that created World War One. Let's recap the recap so ...
November 27, 2015
Actually, it wouldn't. And we're not sure the BIS is really worried about it. The report may simply be an exercise in predictive analysis. After all, if you are the dominant force in your industry, you have to anticipate challenges. Of course, there is the theo ...
November 26, 2015
One of Wall Street's fundamental memes is that no matter what is going on in the larger market, one should always be prepared to sell gold. Precious metals could devalue down to nearly nothing and still the cry would be raised on Wall Street to "sell." This ana ...
November 26, 2015
What is racism? USA Today is available to enlighten us. This article by Eric S. Yellin, an associate professor of history at the University of Richmond, makes a number of points about the subject. Racism, as we wrote earlier this week, is becoming a fashionable ...
November 25, 2015
Fortune magazine gives us a heads up on what the Federal Reserve may soon mandate for banks, as can be seen in the excerpt above. The test is actually fairly simple, though doubtless the details are complex. First the Fed figures out how much money a bank would ...
November 25, 2015
It's nice that NATO is concerned about world peace. Russia seems angrier. Following Turkey's downing of a Russian jet near the Syrian-Turkey border, Vladimir Putin called Turkey's actions a "stab in the back." What Putin meant by this was that Russia was removi ...
November 24, 2015
Will the Fed really hike? Savvy market observers have maintained that the Fed is trapped due to the enormous size of the US national debt. It can't hike too hard or too fast. Perhaps it can't hike at all. This is why we've been pointing out that it is preferabl ...
November 24, 2015
The Hegelian dialectic is proceeding apace. We learn about the above "pushback" from "The College Fix." This was predictable, was it not? These are indeed interesting times. All of a sudden there are new, "vibrant" feminist movements on campus. Hillary is runni ...
November 23, 2015
NBC, like most of the mainstream media, is in full cry about how to defeat ISIS. Of course, it might be helpful to figure out where ISIS came from and how it got to be as formidable as it is (if indeed the acts attributed to it are true). We made a stab in this ...
November 23, 2015
Peter Bergen believes Syrian refugees trying to gain entrance to the US are no threat. But as we can see from the above excerpt, Congress is not so sure and appears to be on its way to passing a bill that would further scrutinize anyone from Syria – and thus ...
November 20, 2015
According to this recent Journal article, gold is weak and getting weaker. Here's a pertinent quote from the article: The only time we see buyers in the market is profit-takers or short-covering," said Graham Leighton, a precious metals broker at Marex Spectron ...
November 20, 2015
One wonders why perpetrators of mass killings are rarely taken alive. Perhaps it is hard to do so, but let us recall pertinent circumstances regarding the Boston Marathon bombing. Here is what conservative/libertarian commentator Dr. Paul Craig Roberts has to s ...
November 19, 2015
This release excerpted above is interesting because it affirms Jim Rogers's abiding interest in Russia and China. While Rogers has made better and worse calls like any other "guru," his instinct about China so many years ago has proven correct, at least to the ...
November 18, 2015
Tough times call for tough measures and in this article, we'll discuss the ramifications of the resolute countermeasures that President Francois Hollande is prepared to take. The bill to declare an apparently open-ended "state of emergency" in France is being p ...
November 18, 2015
We wrote this Reuters article! Not really. But we were astonished when we read it, because it makes all the points that we made in a previous article of ours called "Who Is the Enemy Here?" An article about the House of Saud might seem to have a geopolitical fo ...
November 17, 2015
The tightening talk is picking up. Principal Global Investors manages some US$350 billion, much of it in retirement plans, and its officials "now assess the likelihood of a December rate rise at 54 per cent," according to Investor Daily. A March rise is assesse ...
November 17, 2015
This article informs us that France seeks a military coalition to fight the Islamic State in Syria and intends to bomb Syria to a bloody pulp to get rid of the terrorist organization. Addressing lawmakers after France observed a minute of silence honoring the 1 ...
November 16, 2015
Our thoughts and prayers are with those hurt and the families of those killed during the Paris attacks. According to various reports, over 130 have now died. Here's some of what's been reported as of this writing: Two restaurants were targeted: Le Petit Cambodg ...
November 16, 2015
Serious secession movements are being pursued around the world – an expanding trend of what we call the Internet Reformation. It has other ramifications, as well, because secessionist unrest can provoke central government reactions, causing monetary and fisca ...
November 13, 2015
Reason magazine does a good job of tracking police brutality, especially when it comes to the drug war. In this case, they report on an Idaho police shooting of a locally well-known rancher. It's certainly a ghastly tale and deserving of the attention it is get ...
November 12, 2015
Millions of people are angry and depressed or just, plain dead. Political systems are convulsed. Europe trembles on the edge of civil war or worse. But in this just-posted article at Fortune Magazine, the immigration crisis is a teachable moment. The wonkery of ...
November 12, 2015
This is indeed an earnest blog, written for personnel involved with military actions. There is an almost palpable delight in the elucidation of various strategies that might be employed in the upcoming Syrian war. Notice how our excerpt concludes, with the ques ...
