STAFF NEWS & ANALYSIS
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August 07, 2010
The BP story just keeps on getting weirder. First it was the most monumental crisis in the history of environmental pollution, and now, if reports are accurate, it is nearly nothing at all. In the meantime, the Obama Administration has attempted to shut-down de ...
August 06, 2010
We have made this point before, but it is an important one, so we'll do so once again: The conversation about freedom in America is alive and well and becoming more important every day. This article in the Baltimore Sun - an editorial actually - provides eviden ...
August 06, 2010
Please don't write to us about VoltaireNet. We understand what it is and its controversial history. We are citing an article from it only because F. William Engdahl, whom we both admire and dislike (idea-wise, not personally) has written an extraordinary series ...
August 05, 2010
There are no less than two eye-opening recent stories in Germany's mainstream Spiegel Online dealing with the Chinese real-estate bubble. You can see an excerpt of one above. The other is called "Chinese Fight Property Seizures by the State," and gives us a fai ...
August 05, 2010
One cannot help but be struck at the timing of such a war, when put into the context of other wars being waged now – either acknowledged or not. The Afghanistan war is an acknowledged one. But there is also an undercover war being waged in Pakistan by US merc ...
August 05, 2010
On a recent visit to Portugal, near Lisbon and right off the Atlantic Coast, I rediscovered that country after having been away from it for 40 years. And it comes across very different now from what it was back then. Most surprisingly it comes across to me like ...
August 04, 2010
Timothy Geithner has written a long, self-congratulatory New York Times article entitled "Welcome to the Recovery." In it, he points out that the US is gradually beginning to do better economically and that the country is "on the path back to growth." The reces ...
August 04, 2010
Those who bother to read the Daily Bell semi-regularly will know that there has been feedback discussion about the Bell's perspective that austerity for Southern Europe is not a good thing. Much pushback to this perspective has come in the form of comments that ...
August 04, 2010
Our foreign policy was in the spotlight last week, which is exactly where it should be. Almost two years ago many voters elected someone they thought would lead us to a more peaceful, rational co-existence with other countries. However, while attention has been ...
August 04, 2010
Tradition says when Lord Cornwallis surrendered at Yorktown back in 1781 the British played this tune as they marched out of the fortifications in surrender to the American army. Whether this actually happened is open to debate but the loss suffered by the grea ...
August 03, 2010
This opinion piece appearing in the American Pocono Record is a great representation of a certain kind of elite dominant social theme: "The marketplace is flawed and government regulatory authority is a necessary corrective, in ever-larger doses if necessary." ...
August 03, 2010
There is a plethora of information on the web concerning Jews and "Money Power" these days - some of it scholarly and some of it running the gamut from bemused to hysterical. Separately, books are continually appearing on the subject and focusing directly on th ...
August 02, 2010
We have written about this dominant social theme before but are constantly amazed by its reoccurrence. Actually, it is not a dominant theme but a sub-dominant social theme, a spinoff of a larger theme, which is, of course, "the world's central banking economy i ...
August 02, 2010
Increasingly, we believe the high-water mark of the Anglo-American axis came in 2007. History will record, as with Rome, that this first decade of the 2000s marked a gradually shifting away from one of the bloodiest annals of human history. The Anglo-American a ...
August 01, 2010
The Daily Bell is pleased to present an exclusive interview with Walter E. Williams. Dr. Williams is the author of over 150 publications which have appeared in scholarly journals such as Economic Inquiry, American Economic Review, Georgia Law Review, Journal of ...
August 01, 2010
An Open Opportunity IRA, however, can be used to control the potential tax bill on your estate, since it easily accommodates what has become a conventional estate planning strategy. With the Open Opportunity structure, your IRA holds just one asset – a limite ...
July 31, 2010
And so we see how memes grow. One dominant social theme we already understand. Central banking itself is a kind of priesthood with Wall Street execs, such as Goldmas Sach's Llyod Blankfein (above left), publicly boasting of their divine relationships to society ...
July 31, 2010
An ordinary IRA requires you to be passive. You're not driving the bus, you're a passenger. An Open Opportunity IRA, on the other hand, lets you act. The IRA owns just one asset-a limited liability company (LLC). All the investing and earning happens inside the ...
July 30, 2010
id the aggregate Irish populace see this coming? It was not so long ago that the Irish voted twice to provide the EU with additional powers that EU leaders had hoped to achieve via the passage of a constitution. When the French along with a few other countries ...
July 30, 2010
Is it really? It looks as if the infamous proponent of this link, Dr. Andrew Wakefield, was correct after all. It is his contention that there is a connection between the gut and autism, and he has specialized in nutrition and gut-cleansing treatments in order ...
July 30, 2010
When you withdraw the money, the deductible contributions you made to a traditional IRA and the income that's been earned inside the IRA will be taxed, as ordinary income. But there is an alternative that you can elect. New rules (effective starting in 2010) ma ...
July 29, 2010
Bet you didn't know that Britain was suffering from high inflation. We didn't anyway and we try to keep on top of these things. We knew that Britain was suffering from a high jobless rate. And we knew that Britain's debts were out of control, causing the countr ...
July 29, 2010
Another day, another dry and witty Economist magazine article advising another large country on what its central bankers need to do. There is never any doubt within The Economist brain-trust that central banking is a necessary phenomenon, or that it merely need ...
July 29, 2010
And investment freedom has not-so-obvious implications for safety. Open Opportunity IRAs make up less than 1% of the IRA universe. So if and when a team of Congressional staffers or a group of Treasury Department bureaucrats get busy drafting up new rules aimed ...
July 29, 2010
There are other metrics beside the gold basis that the market has developed in the meantime. One such is GOFO = $ LIBOR – GLR (the gold lease rate). On the face of it, GOFO cannot ever go negative. If it did, it would mean that the risk in borrowing gold is g ...
July 28, 2010
The Telegraph has been very good at diagnosing deflationary trends in the larger economy, and we have agreed with this analysis because it seems obvious. What is noteworthy, however, is that prices keep going down, as the Telegraph analyzes above, even though t ...
July 28, 2010
Let's summarize," he said. "We got an albino misfit with a strange name running around from country to country and leaking confidential information onto hundreds of anonymous servers. We'll fund the operation, but he'll pretend to be aided by generous anonymous ...
July 28, 2010
The president of the AAUP - American Association of University Professors - issued a lengthy declaration warning the membership against getting involved with BP, the giant oil company whose operations have gone awry in the Gulf of Mexico and whose management is ...
July 28, 2010
There is now a robust political constituency supporting the generous tax treatment given to IRAs. One element is the 40 million people who have an IRA. A second element is the retail financial industry – banks, brokerage houses, mutual funds and insurance com ...
July 27, 2010
This is a treat. We were scrolling through the 'Net and came on this June China analysis laid out in an Israeli blog that bills itself as one that offers "a Libertarian and Austrian View on Economic, Financial and Geopolitical Issues." Since we have been writin ...
July 27, 2010
Yesterday, we surmise, was one long headache for those in charge of the Afghanistan war on the Western side. Metaphorically, many good officers in the Pentagon and elsewhere stood in the middle of otherwise efficient offices holding their collective heads. Bad ...
July 27, 2010
Recently the Washington Post ran an extensive report by Dana Priest and William M. Arkin on the bloated intelligence community. They found that an estimated 854,000 people hold top-secret security clearances. Just what are all these people up to? By my calculat ...
July 27, 2010
We, who were raised in pre-nihilist America, find most of today's movies, TV programs and literary works hideous and depressing. We cringe at the obsessive sexuality of Hollywood's cinematic pretensions, at its love affair with anti-heroes, and the reprehensibl ...
July 26, 2010
Of course from our point of view the Economist is one of the mouthpieces for the British elite. As dashing and amusing as Punch magazine, as erudite as another mainstream mouthpiece, the Financial Times, the Economist profiles the goings-on of the world every w ...
July 26, 2010
We take a time out, in this article, to cast our admittedly jaundiced eye on the beautiful Angelina Jolie, perhaps the world's biggest female movie star. Why focus on Angelina Jolie? We find in her, to be frank, a well-traveled and weird intersection between Ho ...
July 26, 2010
A real bill, as its name suggests, is just a notice of payment due that typically the wholesale merchant sends to the retail merchant along with his shipment of goods demanded most urgently by the consumers. It is useful to think of the bill as a security in th ...
July 25, 2010
The Daily Bell is pleased to present an exclusive interview with Dr. Grant Havers. Dr. Havers is Professor of Philosophy and Chair of the Department of Philosophy (with a cross-appointment in the Department of Political Studies) at Trinity Western University. H ...
July 24, 2010
When is a meme not a meme? Maybe when it is true. The power elite creates memes – global warming is an example – that are untrue but nonetheless are intended to generate fear and confusion. It is the construction of this emotion that results in people givin ...
July 24, 2010
How would you like to begin a peaceful, legitimate political action which could roll back the last 100 years of government growth and national debt along with the hated federal income tax and the Fed? What if you could force Washington to return to a strong dol ...
July 24, 2010
Prime Minister Ference Gyurcsany, identified by some as "the golden boy" of Hungary's Socialist Party, got himself into serious trouble with many Hungarians for having admitted, in a leaked closed-door party conference speech, that during his two years term as ...
July 23, 2010
In this article we will debunk once more the idea that government can spend its way out of a recession. It is our modest contribution to the 21st century, which we can truthfully label an "Age of Misinformation," fortunately alleviated by the advent of the Inte ...
July 23, 2010
The militarization of American society is a long-term project in our opinion. It began shortly after Vietnam when the Pentagon, confronting the wreckage of failed military policies, began a rehabilitation campaign that resulted in the formation of a private, vo ...
July 22, 2010
We can see from this brief synopsis that central banking, the artificial creation of money-stuff (especially the mercantilist variety) manufactures both inflation and asset bubbles. But in doing so, central bankers get to pose as combatants of the very problems ...
July 22, 2010
Yesterday we reported on a startling cover story that appeared in Newsweek written by Richard N. Haass, the president of the famous Council on Foreign Relations, all-but-admitting the war in Afghanistan was a lost cause and suggesting ways that Western goals of ...
July 21, 2010
We have written numerous articles about the Chinese miracle with the intent of trying to explain that while China may have created a Western competitive face, the reality is otherwise. We have provided these articles because the current Western approach to Chin ...
July 21, 2010
Thus it is that we were able to determine last year, far sooner than most (if not all) publications, that the American Federal Reserve was going to come under sustained attack; we made this prognostication when we noticed that the Fed was not mounting convincin ...
July 21, 2010
Don't believe it for a moment. The American Left, as a whole, does not support civil liberties. All that protestation of about Bush and Cheney's allegedly unconstitutional expansion of presidential powers was just a bunch of empty hand-waiving. The New York Tim ...
July 20, 2010
This US law seems fairly invasive. Year-to-year, any payments to a vendor of more than US$600 will have to be reported to the IRS. While we were aware of this payment mandate, we hadn't fully realized the consequences for gold and silver until a feedbacker poin ...
July 20, 2010
We have long held that the war is being waged specifically and obviously against the Pashtun. But given that the two great tribes of this region both seem unfavorable to continued Western intervention, the West is likely unable to bring the war to a successful ...
July 20, 2010
Last week ended with some promising news on finally stopping the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. Unfortunately, the administration still seems to believe that shutting down working oil wells is a higher priority than effectively dealing with the broken one. Th ...
