STAFF NEWS & ANALYSIS
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January 26, 2015
Is this for real? India is one of the most corrupt countries in the world, as well as one of the most populous. If India is the second most trusted nation in the world, then God help the others. Here's what Wikipedia has to say about India: A study conducted by ...
January 23, 2015
The "big brains" gathered in Davos are mostly successful in material terms and powerful from the standpoint of our modern economic system. But in the early 21st century, these attributes may prove ephemeral. And that's probably the reason for the gloom that is ...
January 23, 2015
The drumbeat advocating additional sanctions against Putin and Russia is evident in this Bloomberg "editors" editorial. It is this attitude that will support a continuance of the Ukraine standoff. From what we can tell, the episode was initiated by the West to ...
January 22, 2015
We never believed the Fed would tighten. And we don't. Not really. We've regularly made statements to that effect. If Fed officials do "tighten" – we figure they'll find some other way to loosen. The money printing goes on. And now here come reports to the ef ...
January 22, 2015
A judge is about to rule on the dangers of cannabis and the ruling may well contradict the federal DEA when it comes to sustaining the position that it is as dangerously addictive as heroin. But there is a larger issue here, which is how fedgov arrived at such ...
January 21, 2015
Again we see the adoption of a dialectical position. The mainstream media has been in full cry over the necessity for money printing and central bank bond purchases. Now, comes a BIS former official – apparently someone with considerable clout – who says ex ...
January 21, 2015
Jim Rickards's column has created a stir among alternative media commentators. GATA's Chris Powell posted a column of his own, commenting on it favorably. Of course, GATA has devoted many years to exposing gold (and silver) manipulation, so Rickards's column at ...
January 20, 2015
The West's economic system, we know now, regularly strips people of wealth. Monopoly central banks debase the currency via money printing and large corporations make entrepreneurialism difficult. If Obama wanted to revive the middle class in the US, he would ha ...
January 20, 2015
Is this sudden interest in mapping farmland a back-door justification for the advancement of Big Agriculture? Will it justify as well a sudden drop in food production and rising farmland prices across the board? The idea of this article is that farmland must no ...
January 19, 2015
So now it begins. Last week the EU Court of Justice advocate general ruled that the central bank could purchase sovereign debt. One by one, the hurdles are toppling and the reality of ECB market purchases grows closer. Of course, last year the German constituti ...
January 19, 2015
This article features a mainstream newspaper reporting clearly what we already know but have rarely seen admitted in the mainstream: Big business and big finance equally have lost the "trust" battle. The paradigm is no longer believable. Having made the admissi ...
January 16, 2015
The meme is strong in this one, apologies to Star Wars. Every time we turn around, we're seeing more mainstream reports about the dangers of deflation. Now, having rejected their gold referendum, the Swiss have de-pegged their currency from the floundering euro ...
January 16, 2015
Over and over magazines churn out reports on the best places for retirement. The suspects are usually much the same names from year to year. But we are never to know all the variables, or why the countries place where they do in these rankings. In the case of C ...
January 15, 2015
Bitcoin is not worth what it used to be mostly in our view because of various "raids" by authorities that have tied the crypto-currency to bad actors and "drug dealers." But we want to make another point. This Economist article shows us once more how one can wr ...
January 15, 2015
Why is inflation good? Why is disinflation or deflation bad? We know what Murray Rothbard believed because he told us: In a free-market economy, there would be gentle deflation because technology constantly made goods and services less expensive. He had no prob ...
January 14, 2015
The deflation meme remains in full cry in Western media. Europe is in a deflationary morass and only Mario Draghi and a Brussels QE can save Europe from appreciating currency. Japan is printing as hard as it can and China is revving up the presses once again. B ...
January 14, 2015
Actually, we are not surprised by this sort of article. It is a bubble article and bubbles are blowing up everywhere – East and West. Central banks are printing and rates are lowering despite the doom and gloom regarding inflation. The asset bubbles are right ...
January 13, 2015
In our view, there is a kind of cold war going on between the US and Russia. The US worked to destabilize Ukraine from what we can tell and now along with Saudi Arabia has caused the price of oil to plummet. Low prices for oil put pressure on Russia's economy a ...
January 13, 2015
Years of protesting Monsanto's business practices may be having an effect. Monsanto is well known for various questionable business practices that result in lawsuits and often put significant burdens on small farmers who cannot afford continued litigation. But ...
January 12, 2015
The Internet Reformation continues. The point of this article is that the Crash of 2008-2009 has given rise to an academic confrontation between professors and students regarding how economics is taught. But for us, the Internet as well must play a role in this ...
January 12, 2015
We are always on the verge of a recovery and then rates will have to move up. That seems to be a fairly consistent mainstream meme. But in the meantime, of course, rates are NOT going up. And this fits into our larger perspective that in a monopoly-fiat central ...
January 09, 2015
This is a continuation of the Wall Street Party meme. We don't believe the Fed has any intention of disinflating, let alone deflating (not seriously anyway) but just in case something happens … here comes Bloomberg to inform us that it doesn't matter. Not to ...
January 09, 2015
The big problem with modern Western medicine is that everything has to be turned into a chemical before it can be marketed. No chemical, no profit, as no one can patent a plant. But if you can mimic the effects of that plant, without using the plant, or use the ...
January 08, 2015
This article is a good example of an EU "leadership" meme. This is actually two themes in one. The first, oft promoted meme is that the EU has devolved into Germany's back yard. It is Germany's union to run as it wishes. The second meme is that leaders like Ms. ...
January 08, 2015
Nowhere is the foundering of the American Dream more evident than in many US suburbs. Suburbs used to lie at the confident beating heart of the American Experience. Now they are prostrate baggage of an ill-conceived social experiment. Suburbs, initially called ...
January 07, 2015
The technocracy meme constantly reemerges. In this case we know why. UKIP, the quasi-libertarian, anti-EU party, is emerging as a potential political winner and many in British leadership are aghast. Solution? Combine forces. This is an idea constantly being pr ...
January 07, 2015
We've written quite a bit about the questionable legal theory behind insider trading and US courts are now starting to agree with us. One point we made on several occasions was that there was no specific statute against insider trading. This was because – or ...
January 06, 2015
It's been pointed out elsewhere on the Internet that the resumption of TPP talks last month was not exactly top news in the Western media. You would think the Western media would be covering this world-changing negotiation, as it affects the flow of information ...
January 06, 2015
We've pointed this out before, but this is another meme that is fast advancing. The idea of disinflation – especially – throughout the West and especially in Europe is being propagated regularly now. We've pointed out regularly that it is difficult to have ...
January 05, 2015
The best way to make sure capitalism becomes more popular is to give people the opportunity to take a bigger stake in it. That's the argument of the head of the London Stock Exchange, Xavier Rolet. He's not only convinced of capitalism's benefits; he also belie ...
January 05, 2015
This is not so much an analysis of gold as one of Bloomberg's regular negative assessments of the yellow metal's future. Bloomberg, as a media product, supports the agenda of major Western investment banks and central banks. There is not a lot of affection amon ...
January 02, 2015
Noah Smith has written another article about whether economics is a science or not, a subject that obsesses him for good reason. If economics is not predictive, what good is it in this day and age? In fact, the field is really only a few hundred years old, if w ...
January 02, 2015
This is a good analysis, in our view, of what might happen regarding Greece and its potential pushback to Brussels-imposed "austerity." No one knows the full story regarding the austerity that has been imposed on Greece, and other Southern European countries as ...
January 01, 2015
Ganesha has inspired us to make predictions for 2015. Our predictions focus on the trends we've covered this year. We begin with central banking, which is the engine driving most of the themes we observe. Central bankers will surely print money at an accelerate ...
January 01, 2015
The idea of this Atlantic article is that US governance generally is abdicating its responsibility to counteract lawlessness and this is fundamentally unbalancing US democracy. This is a perceptive point, though to ignore the legal and regulatory barrage genera ...
December 31, 2014
This article presents the idea that people are going to get so fed up with do-nothing politicians – hamstrung by gridlock – that they will rise up and demand a dictatorship. The logic fails to convince us, though the article is penned by an award-winning pr ...
December 31, 2014
This Bloomberg editorial purports to be puzzled by the "two faces" of Frau Merkel. But the solution to the puzzle is to recognize that Merkel is not powerful at all. Sound shocking? We'll expand below … Politicians in this day and age generally are not powerf ...
December 30, 2014
We've covered Piketty and his book in several articles but this article from Bloomberg shows how memes can be perpetuated even when the evidence for the meme is lacking. The article actually provides us with a cogent analysis of the wrongness of Piketty's argum ...
December 30, 2014
We've written about "organic" food because it's a "hot" trend. But we've also wondered whether the corporate farming model can adapt to organic approaches. We wrote about some of those issues here: When Choice Matters: Organic Food vs. Organic Investing. Consum ...
December 29, 2014
We almost missed this strange little article about some very big issues. Seems the Bank for International Settlements is upset with the Federal Reserve over its market posture. Fed officials want to regulate market risks and forego interest rate hikes. BIS offi ...
December 29, 2014
We are often critical of Bloomberg, but this is a pretty good editorial. At least we agree with part of it! We've been writing regularly about the inflation versus deflation debate and here comes Bloomberg taking an astonishingly clear-eyed position. Here's mor ...
December 26, 2014
Our suspicions about the Sony hack were raised when North Korea accused the US of involving its CIA. By then the story had been continuously presented by the mainstream media, always a sign that some sort of promotion was underway. And now the next shoe has dro ...
December 26, 2014
This editorial informs us that people may be surprised what happens regarding cannabis next year ... legalization at a federal level. Are you surprised? Certainly, the Republican takeover of Congress may be widely seen as an impediment to further drug legalizat ...
December 25, 2014
We checked 'Net search engines but there was little this year about the consumerist backlash against Christmas. We know it exists, but the mainstream media doesn't seem to be in the mood to comment on it. Then this recent MarketWatch article turned up. It estim ...
December 25, 2014
Robert Reich is back with his usual optimism about fixing Leviathan – see the above article excerpt. Who is Robert Reich? He is "the nation's 22nd Secretary of Labor and a professor at the University of California at Berkeley. His film 'Inequality for All' is ...
December 24, 2014
You would think that this market would already have foundered. The US recovery is suspect. Government price inflation numbers and employment numbers are unreliable at best. Most importantly, this stock market boom has been going on since late 2009. That's aroun ...
December 24, 2014
For years we had arguments with "peak oilers" who maintained that the world was running out of oil. Of course, they always objected to this simplified version of their arguments. Peak oilers liked to clothe their arguments in intricate statistics. The only peop ...
December 23, 2014
We can see in this Bloomberg editorial how central banks and their good, gray leaders are going to be positioned going forward. Assume that the US and Britain are in a "recovery" of sorts. Now mainstream pundits such as those that populate Bloomberg are going t ...
December 23, 2014
It looks as if the just-released report on the CIA and torture has blown up this tragic issue in a very public manner. And now, one way or another, the "establishment" has to deal with it. We dealt with this yesterday in our lead article entitled, "US Power Cen ...
December 22, 2014
The US is splitting apart: Some 60 years of expanding authoritarianism has created political and economic facilities that are now beginning to face off against each other. There are dozens of intel agencies, hundreds of military specializations, vast bureaucrac ...
