STAFF NEWS & ANALYSIS
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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 – with government approved credentials – 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) – 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 – by the BBC no less – that one of the world's more impoverished nations – Kenya – 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" – respected free-market commentators – 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
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 26, 2013
We've written about the history of newspapering – pamphleteering really – 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 25, 2013
Simon Black's Sovereign Man tells us that the top gold storage firm worldwide – ViaMat – 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 – 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 ...
February 24, 2013
The Daily Bell is pleased to present this exclusive interview with Robert Wenzel. Here's a brief snippet. Daily Bell: Has libertarianism and Austrian free-market thinking advanced in the past ten years as a result of the Internet? Robert Wenzel: Very much so. T ...
February 23, 2013
"Fiscal trouble ahead for most future retirees." Or so the Washington Post tells us in a recent column explaining why future retirees (Baby Boomers) are headed for considerable trouble. Grim reading, actually. For the first time since the New Deal, a majority o ...
February 22, 2013
The European dialectic is alive and well in the Eurozone and beyond. Across the EU, recession (depression) spreads and we are told that the only response is a central banking one. The EU economic morass can only be alleviated by additional easing as the spigot ...
February 22, 2013
The world's top elite families have stored their gold in Switzerland for a long time, hundreds of years. And during that time, Swiss private bankers have served this vast Money Power with discretion and courtesy. Swiss private banking is not going away, no matt ...
February 22, 2013
France is a second-rate world power and now its President François Hollande has been given a second-rate peace prize. Barack Obama walked off with the big one as soon as he was elected. He was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. What exactly US President Obama did ...
February 22, 2013
When you're in a situation and you feel like reacting with anger, or fear, or hurt feelings – anything that feels like it's an automatic, purely emotional response – you have a choice as to what to do about it. You can react, or you can choose to do somethi ...
February 21, 2013
The Financialist is published by the vast securities firm of Credit Suisse, and thus we are not surprised to find this sentiment being enunciated by officials in charge of this publication. It is, of course, a kind of elite dominant social theme. The idea is th ...
February 21, 2013
The New York Times recently opened up its editorial section to a discussion of why ratings agencies had failed so miserably during the financial crisis of 2007-2008 and what could be done to improve them. We've written about this in the past, concluding that ra ...
February 21, 2013
The United States penitentiary-industrial complex imprisons one-third to one-half of all incarcerated individuals in the world. Additionally, it has been reported that one of every three US individuals have some sort of interaction with the criminal justice sys ...
February 21, 2013
Over the last several years, statists have changed their tune a bit. Instead of advocating Draconian governmental intrusions on people's lives, in the tradition of the Soviets and other unabashed tyrants, they have at least seemingly reformed and changed their ...
February 20, 2013
China's central bankers have decided that the US economy is in fine shape, according to the UK Telegraph. This doesn't make much sense, given the US's generalized economic and socio-political difficulties but we wouldn't expect China's central planners to figur ...
February 20, 2013
Price fixing is back with a new title, "human" – as in "minimum human wage." We are indebted to the The Economist magazine for bringing us this latest jargon. We disagree with the concept, of course ... profoundly. As we pointed out just yesterday, The Econom ...
February 20, 2013
We've regularly tracked the progress of what we call the neo-Pecora meme – elite dominant social theme, really – and now we note Senator Elizabeth Warren's contribution. Reuters, an aggregate backer of regulatory democracy, is giving her latest outburst sig ...
February 20, 2013
This is the fourth of the "12 Axioms of Freedom Restoration" set forth in my introductory article on this topic, "How to Restore the West." The restoration of America's first and legitimate government will not be a quick or easy task but it is necessary if we a ...
February 19, 2013
James Buchanan is dead and we will not speak ill of the dead – nor should we in the case of the free-market oriented Buchanan. But we can certainly point out that his death gives The Economist (that most insufferable of all "newspapers"), yet one more opportu ...
February 19, 2013
Unlike many in the alternative media, we spent a lot of time covering the civil war that overtook Ivory Coast after the botched election between Laurent Gbagbo and the country's current president, Alassane Ouattara. Ouattara is Muslim and Gbagbo is Christian. D ...
February 19, 2013
We've written about David Icke before, suggesting that what is seemingly inexplicable and strange – downright nutty – about his conspiracy theories is no different than the great artist William Blake's creation of poetic cosmogony in his era. You can see ou ...
February 19, 2013
Last week, senators threatened to put a "hold" on the nomination of John Brennan to be CIA director over his refusal to answer questions about the use of drones to kill Americans on US soil. That the president's nominee to head the agency that has used drones t ...
February 19, 2013
Paradigms are mega-systems of thought that explain certain realms of reality so as to shift mankind toward new visions. For example, mercantilism, Lockean limited government, species evolution, Pasteurian medicine, quantum physics, Keynesian economics and welfa ...
February 19, 2013
As the global currency war intensifies, the majority of attention has been paid to the 17% fall of the Japanese yen against the US dollar over the past few months. The implosion has given cover to the sad performance of another once mighty currency: the British ...
February 18, 2013
Two issues need to be clarified about the current junk boom. First, it doesn't exist and second, you ought not to want it to. The modern junk bond market, when it is really in evidence, is a multi-trillion dollar entity. A few deals do not a resurgent junk bond ...
February 18, 2013
The post-World War II period in the United States saw a number of exposes take place that have since been debunked. One can speculate on the reasons why but it seems fairly clear that the social order was being attacked to make people feel less certain about th ...
February 18, 2013
Counterpunch, one of the United States's top leftist media facilities, has launched a long screed analyzing the attack that Africa has now come under from the West. This attack has been going on for years, but the editors at Counterpunch – in this article, an ...
February 18, 2013
One of the biggest and most controversial memes of the modern era is environmentalism, specifically the idea that manmade carbon is clogging the skies and making disastrous global warming inevitable. The amount of carbon that man injects into the atmosphere is ...
