STAFF NEWS & ANALYSIS
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October 10, 2014
We wish we could be more sympathetic to US tech giants, but we can't. The largest US firms have apparently – and obviously – turned themselves into a kind of Trojan horse for the US intelligence community and for law enforcement besides. Now Congress is hol ...
October 10, 2014
For a while, asset forfeiture in the US was a much-discussed topic, but then it faded away. We missed this Forbes article in September that puts the controversy into perspective and offers some reasonable solutions. Of course, the larger issue is a kind of offi ...
October 09, 2014
Just recently the Crash of 1929 loomed over Western stock markets, especially the Dow. But on Wednesday the Roaring Teens resumed. Like the Roaring '20s, this stock market is destined to climb as high as the Federal Reserve will allow it to go. Of course, marke ...
October 09, 2014
We recently wrote that a certain amount of skepticism might be warranted when surveying reports about Ebola and the grimness of its potential spread. But skepticism aside, there are other larger questions as well regarding how the Ebola epidemic is going to be ...
October 08, 2014
So having severed what was left of the link between gold and the Swiss franc around 2000 AD, the Swiss are now having second thoughts. Good luck to them. We've tried to figure out if there's more to this than meets the eye. We're not sure. Usually when somethin ...
October 08, 2014
This is an interesting article by leftist columnist Paul Waldman because it explains the overarching destruction of war, not just for those on the receiving end but for those who prosecute it, even victoriously. The article is also noteworthy because it does no ...
October 07, 2014
Gold has continued its downward trend, and confusingly so. As we can see from the above, expectations that the US Federal Reserve would start hiking rates sent the yellow metal tumbling. But is that how it's supposed to work? As we recall, rising rates have the ...
October 07, 2014
In the past half-century or so, cannabis has been identified by the mainstream media as a "drug" that is used mostly for recreational purposes. But that's not so, as we can see from the above article excerpt. What's being rediscovered about cannabis is just how ...
October 06, 2014
We made it up. There is no record that we know awarded for the "most single foolish financial sentence" of the year. But if there were, Business Insider would be in the running. We'll get to the sentence in a minute. First, let's examine the larger argument tha ...
October 06, 2014
African skepticism regarding Ebola has been reported on for the past few months and this article posted at Yahoo shows us that the skepticism persists – warranted or not. These reports were especially numerous in mid- to late- summer when Ebola cases were sca ...
October 03, 2014
This kind of article is a fairy tale organized around selected numerical evidence. It reminds us of the famous phrase, "lies, damned lies and statistics," often attributed to Mark Twain. The article is posted at the Washington Post and is actually penned by blo ...
October 03, 2014
We're trying to lay off Mr. Noah Smith's fatuous articles, but he has perfected a bad combination: He is intelligent enough to discern media memes but he is defiantly uneducated, a lethal combination when it comes to commenting on the themes he intends to analy ...
October 02, 2014
In a wide-ranging speech and fresh off a "no secession" vote in Scotland, UK Prime Minister David Cameron sounded like a convert to free-market thinking. This has sent conservative journos into a kind of subdued adulatory shock – and editorialist Janet Daley ...
October 02, 2014
Megan McArdle is one of Bloomberg's more libertarian editorialists, and in this column she actually comes right out and states the truth about regulation ... And what is the hidden truth? Regulation is seldom adversarial and not particularly effective because t ...
October 01, 2014
There is nothing in this world today that provides much comfort for a rational investor – in the long term. In the short term, as we have argued, this expanding Wall Street Party may provide a last chance for significant, individual investment gains. More on ...
October 01, 2014
Alan Greenspan, Gold Bug, has scuttled back into view with a typical statement – one posted at Foreign Affairs – that implies a good deal more than it explains. Greenspan has spent years, decades, dealing with the continued fallout of a famous article he wr ...
September 30, 2014
It's fairly predictable now. A Wall Street transgression is noted and trumpeted and the call goes out for prosecutions. Often the rhetoric is accompanied by demands for additional regulatory rigor and perhaps a whole new strata of regulatory oversight. It's rea ...
September 30, 2014
This is another article that shows how quickly cannabis is changing from an illegal substance to a marketable commodity. We recently noted this trend in an article that focused on the tax revenue that would inevitably be gained by states that decriminalized or ...
September 29, 2014
Mohamed A. El-Erian was basically number two at the bond giant PIMCO until he decided he wasn't going to wait for Bill Gross to retire. Too bad for him ... as Gross quit the other day. El-Erian, meanwhile, is writing over at Bloomberg, among other gigs, and thi ...
September 29, 2014
Something happened on the way to the "Occupy" movement's apparent demise. It's gone international. Now according to Reuters, it's responsible for the Hong Kong unrest taking place to protest the Chinese government's stance on more forceful Hong Kong rule. When ...
September 26, 2014
Suddenly, in one brief, political exchange of opinions, the pretense has been stripped away, revealing the underlying distortions of the French economy. France is suffering from the problems that Southern European countries know only too well: high unemployment ...
September 26, 2014
In our efforts to cover elite memes and their successes and failures, we occasionally notice significant signposts – reports that indicate the strengthening or weakening of a given thematic element. Chief among the instruments in the global toolkit are war an ...
September 25, 2014
This is an interesting article by a Bloomberg editorialist – Noah Smith – whose editorials sometimes border on the ridiculous. He's a firm Keynesian – a believer that money-from-nothing can cure most economic ills – and we've written about some of his e ...
September 25, 2014
Ever since tiny Uruguay's announcement regarding the legalization of cannabis, we've been more convinced than ever this movement is going worldwide. There are many reasons for this but two we'll focus on in this article: (1) the money that governments can make ...
September 24, 2014
There are two parts to this analysis. In the first part, we'll take a look at what's going on in Germany. In the second part, we'll discuss the announcements by Rockefeller Brothers Fund officials that they were divesting the fund of fossil fuels. Our discussio ...
September 24, 2014
This is not actually just an SEC issue. Regulatory agencies increasingly pay out cash rewards to those who provide the government names of potential wrongdoers. Homeland Security encourages citizens to inform on their neighbors if they see anything that might l ...
September 23, 2014
Yes, it's crazy time. For some reason the mainstream media is in full cry about taxes again. It's good to raise taxes, you see, higher and higher until "deficits" come down and the world's fiscal house is "in order." That's what this Bloomberg article is mostly ...
September 23, 2014
Users of cannabis are just like you and me. In fact, over time we've predicted that cannabis will assume the industrial profile of wine or cigars. There will be cannabis to suit most every taste and mood, from very expensive brands to inexpensive ones. In the m ...
September 22, 2014
Every time we believe the heights of economic ridiculousness have been reached, we find there is yet a further peak proffered. In this case, as you can see from the excerpt above, we are being solemnly assured that the world's "most powerful finance ministers" ...
September 22, 2014
The New York Times is scrambling to keep up with 21st century realities. It's very doubtful that the Times would have run similar stories to this one, excerpted above, in the 20th century. But that was then and this is now. The Times's readership is doubtless d ...
September 19, 2014
It's hard to pick stocks these days because what's going on is so wrong. Surely a crash must be looming at any second. And yet when Yahoo sat down with David Stockman for an interview, the questioner pointed out that since David Stockman had last warned people ...
September 19, 2014
Yesterday we commented on the Scottish election and how Scotland's referendum on leaving Britain was important because of its larger implications. In this Internet era, elite control is continually waning. While, as we've discussed in the past, there may be a n ...
September 18, 2014
The mainstream media is filled with noise about the Federal Reserve's announcement/non-announcement of yesterday. Basically, a middle-aged woman announced that a group of men and women would not raise or lower the price of money that they controlled – but may ...
September 18, 2014
We've written about this once already, but we didn't want to write about it again until the aftermath. But then it occurred to us that no matter what happens regarding Scotland, the entropy of the modern age has been advanced. And that's a good thing. We've bee ...
September 17, 2014
Peter Thiel, the famous investor in such startups as PayPal and Facebook, has posted an interesting article over at the Wall Street Journal. It is an excerpt from a larger book (Zero to One) that deals with how to build successful companies. In the article exce ...
September 17, 2014
When one tries to figure out what has happened to US economic health, this figure ought to come to mind: 134. That is, 134 wars. This is not a figure you'll find mentioned in the mainstream news media, though the Global Post is actually a pretty big news organi ...
September 16, 2014
This Times editorial was featured at the top of the well-known Drudge Report and has obviously had an impact on the chattering classes. It's written in pseudo-liturgical cadences and is reminiscent of the great allegorical poem that we have often quoted by WB Y ...
September 16, 2014
Reading articles by our favorite Telegraph author, Ambrose Evans-Pritchard, we are exposed to news and analysis not found elsewhere in the mainstream press. This article is a good example. But it is also an example of how elite memes are produced and presented, ...
September 15, 2014
This article makes the point that the problem with the European economy is a lack of competitiveness, not a lack of money. This is an important, even fundamental point. We've written a number of articles recently explaining why the European Central Bank's new m ...
September 15, 2014
This was predictable. Buffett is finally making a move. What's a little puzzling is why he waited so long. But it had to come. We've already predicted that the industry is going to see corporate participation and sooner than later. Industrial giants are all goi ...
September 12, 2014
Ambrose Evans-Pritchard provides us with a trenchant analysis of what's taking place in Europe, and then makes a wrong turn toward the end of the article. He does that a lot these days. Nonetheless, it's an interesting report, explaining that Europe is increasi ...
September 12, 2014
According to this article, there may be a crash in the fall, but investors should protect themselves, stay in the market and treat a crash as a buying opportunity. The market is having a long-term bull run, according to this article, and investors should be exp ...
September 11, 2014
This is a funny editorial in Bloomberg because its author is convinced that mainstream dominant social themes constitute the truth of this world. The article worries that a withdrawal of belief in elite memes indicates that Dark Ages are creeping over the West ...
September 11, 2014
This article is provided to us by Norman Tebbit, a well-known "conservative commentator" and former Thatcher cabinet minister. His point is that the panicky offer by David Cameron to give more power directly to the Scottish assembly if the Scots vote against in ...
September 10, 2014
This Economist article is all about why price inflation is necessary to help Europe's bleeding economies achieve "fiscal consolidation." Fiscal consolidation is a polite descriptive term for raising taxes and cutting government spending. Inflation helps this pr ...
September 10, 2014
Perhaps alone in the blogosphere, as regular readers know, The Daily Bell identified the "meme" of cannabis legalization almost immediately. High Alert was then able to utilize this knowledge to identify shareholder opportunities – some of which are ongoing. ...
September 09, 2014
Imagine taking bits of colored paper, making more of them and then waiting for jobs to appear. One has little to do with the other, but according to a steady stream of articles in Bloomberg and the rest of the mainstream media, such an act leads to an inevitabl ...
September 09, 2014
Last year, India's government made it harder and more expensive to import gold and this article in the Financial Times trumpets the success the government has had in its war on gold. Because of India's insatiable demand for gold, the country's current account b ...
September 08, 2014
We've written regularly about the difficulties with the EU for years and what's astonishing is that almost all of our predictions about its dysfunctional nature – and predictable results – have been realized, and yet the EU staggers on. There were even, as ...
September 08, 2014
It is really astonishing to contemplate how far we have come in the past few years since decriminalization of cannabis exploded onto the world scene. And since the legalization of cannabis in Uruguay, conversations and actions concerning the "mainstreaming" of ...
