STAFF NEWS & ANALYSIS
Showing 5051 - 2 of 2
March 07, 2013
This is certainly a well-written and incisive analysis but we find it difficult to believe in this day and age that someone can argue that printing paper money is not of itself inflationary and that it will not lead to price inflation. The Austrian β free-mar ...
March 07, 2013
Wow, Bill Gates writes a book review on his site, TheGatesNotes, and we get a glimpse of how the great man thinks about major issues of our time. Gates hits a lot of the right notes in his review, from our perspective. Of course, we haven't read the book so we ...
March 07, 2013
For years I subscribed to The New York Times online. Then I took the Sunday Times only for a couple of years but they managed to annoy me nearly as much as the daily edition. (I still have the online version, mainly so that I can check in on the latest balderda ...
March 07, 2013
"'Fat, Sick and Nearly Dead' ... in essence shows how 80 percent of America can solve most of their health care problems at very low cost because the thing that is driving health care expenses up is you have a highly controlled, highly governmentalized system β ...
March 06, 2013
Mark Carney is set to be the next Governor of the Bank of England, so his words are worth listening to. In a message to university students at Western University (see above) Carney revealed the reason for the regulatory push that is going on in the EU and North ...
March 06, 2013
This New Yorker article offers us tribute to monetary policy. But certainly there must be a question about manipulating stock averages up using increased money flows. The article ends by challenging free-market types to "acknowledge the success" of politics and ...
March 06, 2013
We've written about this emerging trend before but it is such a startling one and contains such great import that it is worth noting again, and perhaps on a regular basis. This Economist article from our point of view is no accident. It conforms to other simila ...
March 06, 2013
This is a strange article because it acknowledges what anyone who has covered business cycles for a length of time knows well β that the demise of such cycles, while regularly predicted is never accurate. Bill Clinton predicted an end to destructive business ...
March 06, 2013
In his Congressional testimony last week in Washington, Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke took time to downplay the significance of the few dissenting voices on the Fed's Open Market Committee (FOMC). Those statements, combined with an even more dovish statement by Fed ...
March 05, 2013
The move toward auditing gold holdings is getting more pronounced as we can see from this demand by Mexico in the above article excerpt. German officials have asked the US government for gold repatriation and so has Venezuela. Now it's Mexico's turn to start th ...
March 05, 2013
Predictions of a bond bubble popping are generally accepted now and not so surprising as they were even a year ago. But this Reuters editorial on the Great Rotation out of bonds makes some good points. No matter what happens with the bond markets β especially ...
March 05, 2013
At this point in the business cycle it's pretty amazing that those running the EU believe that controlling bank bonuses by regulatory fiat is going to do anything to ameliorate the EU's larger problems. The issue, of course, is not out-of-control banks or banke ...
March 05, 2013
Not so fast. It certainly begins to look like Chavez is not going to recover from his long struggle with cancer and a surface analysis of South America without Chavez might conclude that the region will be less confrontational. But this may not be the case. Cha ...
March 05, 2013
Officially, since June 2009 the US economy has been undergoing an economic recovery from the December 2007 recession. But where is this recovery? I cannot find it, and neither can millions of unemployed Americans. The recovery exists only in the official measur ...
March 05, 2013
Testifying before the US Senate this past Tuesday, Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke made an extraordinary claim about its bloated balance sheet: "We could exit without ever selling by letting it run off." What Bernanke means here is that the Fed could simply hold its ...
March 04, 2013
Black Swan. Being Austrian, we never believed in it to begin with. There are business cycles, triggered by excessive money printing β and these cycles predictably trigger black swan events. Which means, really, there are no black swans. The black swan was a k ...
March 04, 2013
The New York Times, like other mainstream publications, is struggling with reader feedback. More and more mainstream media limits feedback to articles, in our view β and this is partially because the feedback seems to be getting more and more vehement ... and ...
March 04, 2013
Wall Street β an intermediating industry β has been cast lately as the cynosure of evil, the center of maleficence. Whatever is wrong with the world springs from Wall Street β or so some think, especially the Occupy Wall Street crowd. But now it appears t ...
March 04, 2013
In another brilliant polemic, the famous Washington's Blog lays out a substantial litany of what the US has lost in terms of rights, and from this article's point of view it is mostly everything. It is an article containing both truth and sincerity. We agree wi ...
March 04, 2013
Despite what the media and politicians would have us believe, the United States did not collapse last Friday when the package of spending reductions known as "sequestration" went into effect. The financial markets hardly blinked, as they have come to be more sk ...
March 04, 2013
Frankly I have no horse in this race, nothing personal in any case. For my money you may marry your grandmother or cat, if all parties consent. Marriages ought to be a matter of contract and not based on any myth or superstition. Folks should not be interfered ...
March 04, 2013
It didn't take long for opponents of the market to pounce after the events of 2008. The crash was said to prove how destructive "unregulated capitalism" could be and how dangerous its supporters were β after all, free-marketeers opposed the bailouts, which ha ...
March 03, 2013
The Daily Bell is pleased to present this exclusive interview with Nigel Farage. Daily Bell: What is your feeling about the EU? Can you sum it up please? Nigel Farage: Like Communism, it is a good idea that has gone badly wrong. The Euro will endure a slow, lin ...
March 02, 2013
Politicker.com recently posted a report on a radio interview by New York Mayor Mike Bloomberg entitled, "Keep Calm and Carry On: Don't Panic About the Sequester." According to the article, Bloomberg stated that the "United States could owe 'an infinite amount o ...
March 02, 2013
This interesting Reuters editorial that seems to reaffirm what has recently been reported in Der Spiegel (see related article, this issue). As we have read other analyses regarding the "end of austerity," we wonder if this begins to constitute a kind of sub-dom ...
March 02, 2013
The United Nations has come under attack for not practicing what it preaches. The EcoGreen editorial above, puts it succinctly as follows: It is not unreasonable to ask the UN to use its own mechanism to offset its emissions. Such bold action would lend the UN ...
March 02, 2013
We have long predicted that the US justice meme would be one of the last to come under attack as a result of the Internet Reformation but the battle has obviously been joined in two high profile cases. In New Zealand, data-content entrepreneur Kim Dotcom is und ...
March 01, 2013
We learn from Der Spiegel that austerity in Greece seems to be subsiding. This comes at the same time that Italy is rejecting Brussels-imposed austerity at the ballot box. Is austerity over? The news is filled with reports about how the Italians have decisively ...
March 01, 2013
As we have mentioned numerous times, the ultimate goal of the current security regime seems to be to create a two-tier travel system in which some people β with government approved credentials β will be able to travel with relative ease while others will no ...
March 01, 2013
Drudge today is carrying a troika of headlines on the decline and fall of the West. - (US) Incomes Drop Most in 20 Years - Eurozone Jobless Hits a Record - Britain Slides Toward New Recession Drudge runs his headlines in a clever fashion, often building a large ...
March 01, 2013
Ben Bernanke spoke out on Tuesday, leaving no doubt where he stands on the QE issue. To print or not to print? He hardly seemed to think about it. Instead, he announced himself four-square in favor. If there is to be any prudence or propriety at America's centr ...
February 28, 2013
It is no accident that people refer to the EU as the EUSSR. In a not very noticeable but nonetheless breathtakingly arrogant statement, a top EU Commissioner has just served notice that EU commissars intend to subject Europe to a massive amount of environmental ...
February 28, 2013
The IMF is ready to pat itself on its collective back and has used an internal report to do so. According to a summary of the report that appeared in TheNews.com, the IMF is now seen as more of an international pal than a nagging nanny. An account of the report ...
February 28, 2013
Singer Bono was back in the news again with please to support the charity he cofounded called ONE. But Bono's campaigning for poverty relief in Africa inevitably brings up larger issues that have plagued almost all modern relief efforts. The biggest issue is th ...
February 28, 2013
As China enters the "Year of the Snake," Singapore stands as a beacon of sound currency in a world gone mad. China's renminbi remains pegged to the US dollar, while even steadfast Switzerland has followed the US, UK, EU, and Japan into an impoverishing strategy ...
February 27, 2013
Like a bad penny, the "financial transaction tax" keeps turning up and if this article is accurate, the tax is gaining momentum around the world and will eventually penetrate the United States as well. And that would be too bad. Wall Street is basically a creat ...
February 27, 2013
As the West's rolling depression drags on, some good things are happening including the gradual devaluation of the reputation of John Maynard Keynes. Now, Bloomberg columnist Matthew Lynn has penned an encouraging opinion piece criticizing the great British eco ...
February 27, 2013
We were impressed by this article posted at the Financial Iceberg (see above) β as it summarized in depth what some other recent articles have also alluded to regarding Canada's suddenly precarious economic situation. The Financial Iceberg is run by Jean-Pier ...
February 27, 2013
If you have a bank account in Australia that you don't "use" for three years, the Australian government is now legally empowered to confiscate your money. We had to read this article several times and we're still having trouble taking it in. We checked and it's ...
February 26, 2013
In a world of monopoly central banking, words have lost their meaning. A "recovery" means that more paper money re-inflates enterprises that might ordinarily be considered bankrupt. Failing firms receive a new lease on life because the powers-that-be won't let ...
February 26, 2013
Ellen Brown is back with another idea of how to get the US economy moving again: Print money and give it to federal and local governments. Good Lord. Once again to the breach. Ms. Brown is back with another screed celebrating local US bureaucracy and proposing ...
February 26, 2013
Suddenly, the US has enough available energy to be self-sufficient for a thousand years. And now we are told β by the BBC no less β that one of the world's more impoverished nations β Kenya β may be able to tap the equivalent of millions of barrels of o ...
February 26, 2013
Well, here we have an example of two "big brains" β respected free-market commentators β that have decidedly different opinions when it comes to intellectual property. In fact, a feedbacker pointed out that we should have asked the free-market economist Rob ...
February 26, 2013
We've written about the history of newspapering β pamphleteering really β but were nonetheless surprised to find a brief synopsis by Reuters columnist Jack Shafer. This is unusual. Twenty-first century journalism suffers from the same technocratic piousness ...
February 26, 2013
A particularly irksome rhetorical ploy against the free society's champions is that they refuse to acknowledge that there is such a thing as the public interest (or public good or general welfare or some such goal). Critics of these champions routinely wag thei ...
February 25, 2013
Simon Black's Sovereign Man tells us that the top gold storage firm worldwide β ViaMat β is refusing to take US clients. He reproduces a memo explaining the decision and then comments, "This is huge. I can't possibly overstate the potential ramifications." ...
February 25, 2013
The United States has recently engaged in so many wars that it has spawned a mercenary industry that is growing into a US$100 billion-a-year commercial enterprise. Is this a "real" business? There is considerable doubt that many of the wars now embarked upon ar ...
February 25, 2013
In what has to be one of the more cynical moves in recent US political history, the White House has announced (see above) that more information freely distributes is better than less information available on via subscription. This turn of events come about six ...
February 25, 2013
While this speech was made a while ago at Davos, we think it is worth noting as Ms. Christine Lagarde is enunciating a significant dominant social theme β that the West is surely destined to perish if savvy officials don't make the proper decisions. The West ...
February 25, 2013
While I oppose most gun control proposals, there is one group of Americans I do believe should be disarmed: federal agents. The use of force by federal agents to enforce unjust and unconstitutional laws is one of the major, albeit overlooked, threats to liberty ...
