STAFF NEWS & ANALYSIS
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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 ...
December 22, 2014
Recently, High Alert announced the opening of an expat community in Colombia in an editorial by Anthony Wile, here: A New Free-Thinking Community for Your Life, Safety and Sanity! While the editorial was greeted with an overwhelmingly positive response, some of ...
December 19, 2014
The Fed has signaled that it has moved to a slightly tougher position regarding eventual rate hikes and the reverberations are felt around the world. The dollar has benefited so far and so have US stocks. But are the reasons being offered in the mainstream medi ...
December 19, 2014
We've mentioned that Reuters columnist Noah Smith is a "gift that keeps on giving." He's back with another such gift in this column, "Maybe There's No Such Thing as a Business Cycle." Actually, the article promises a bit more than it delivers. Smith doesn't act ...
December 18, 2014
The tech bubble of 2000 led directly to the crisis of 2008 because after 2000 central banks radically dropped rates and began to swell the monetary base. And now they are doing it again. There was, of course, a bobble when Ben Bernanke raised rates and we've of ...
December 18, 2014
Think of inflation as fire and deflation as ice. How will this latest asset reflation end? Will it subside into ice – a tremendous monetary and price deflation? Or will the current asset expansion continue into a catastrophe of fire? Often, as we've pointed o ...
December 17, 2014
Bloomberg was in full cry last night regarding a failing Russian economy. We've never seen anything like it on Bloomberg: The front page of the website carried a box on the top left hand corner filled with blaring stories. It is this latter editorial that we ar ...
December 17, 2014
In the Internet era it is increasingly difficult to actualize dominant social themes. An "actualization," of course, is a news story showing the validity of the meme or theme. Several years ago, the mainstream media tried to actualize the "thoughtless and bruta ...
December 16, 2014
A recent article of ours made the point that deflation and disinflation are unstable monetary states in an era of central banking. While we didn't draw precise definitional lines between various kinds of deflation, our point was clear enough: Deflation and disi ...
December 16, 2014
Warm weather often promises an abundance of food. But for global warming promoters, warmer weather is to be feared. Purposefully or not, "scientific" research, media reports and over-regulation form an unholy triangle of food scarcity. Simplify the explanation ...
December 15, 2014
This is an absurd article. US lifestyles and retirement possibilities have been on a downward arc since at least the turn of the century. And if one goes back and compares the 1950s to the present day, the current financial environment looks even worse. Since 1 ...
December 15, 2014
Gavin Seim and people like him are perhaps the fruit of this Internet era. They are educated and fervent about protecting constitutional freedoms. Yet there is a big difference between understanding what has been lost and regaining it. Seim is already on the ra ...
December 12, 2014
The idea behind this article is that openness is good and more openness is even better. The article makes a pretense of asking whether this is a sensible conclusion, but at the heart of the article is an argument for more transparency. The idea is that governme ...
December 12, 2014
Richard Gingras, Head of Google News, posted this update on Thursday, explaining that Google News would have to close in Spain. That's because Spanish legislators have decided that any time someone reproduces even a few words of someone else's writing, it is no ...
December 11, 2014
This is huge news, and it's definitely launched in a big way on the mainstream media. As of this writing, the situation is still in flux but from what we've read this legislation is taking place. Even if it doesn't happen this time, it's part of a trend that wi ...
December 11, 2014
This is a case of one step forward, one step backward when it comes to cannabis legalization. But in a sense the two occurrences we'll discuss here shed some light on the larger mechanism of legalization now taking place. The first occurrence is Congress steppi ...
December 10, 2014
The contradictions of the current "bull" market worldwide are catching up with the averages. Call it an equity "cognitive dissonance." Understandable turmoil in Greece combined with the puncturing of an "exuberant" Chinese stock market caused a sudden global se ...
December 10, 2014
So now it is general knowledge that the US tortured throughout the Bush administration ... and beyond. The publication of this information by the Senate Intelligence Committee is generating a massive wave of indignation around the world. The US has long been se ...
December 09, 2014
This is an interesting meme. Economists ARE influential, though not for the reasons that The Economist enumerates. In fact, we can make an argument that modern mainstream economics is entirely a manufactured science: in the past we've done just that. Anyway, th ...
December 09, 2014
This interesting survey confirms what has seemed obvious to us and our readers for years: That the 'Net is making people more informed, not less. This has proven to be, in our view, an unstoppable process and one that is sparking major social changes. We track ...
