STAFF NEWS & ANALYSIS
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May 12, 2010
We are always shocked by NASA's profligacy and the way it goes about spending billions. It's not far behind the Pentagon in that regard. And we guess the European Space Agency shares similar characteristics. We suppose that this announcement is a way for NASA t ...
May 12, 2010
America is no stranger to the ditches along with the fools who persist in driving us there; and the world of politics is an excellent arena to demonstrate this fact. For over four decades now from 1968 to 2010, the Republican Party hierarchy has been playing th ...
May 11, 2010
Eurozone leaders are ready to defend the euro with the equivalent of US$1trillion if necessary. The American Fed and other central banks stand ready to help too apparently. There are several conclusions to be reached from this – and the mainstream and alterna ...
May 11, 2010
We can't help but be a little pleased when the mainstream media occasionally validates our point of view (truly cheap thrills), and in this case, the BBC has posted a report that aligns well with something we wrote in late April. Our intrepid feedbackers provid ...
May 11, 2010
It doesn't come as too much of a surprise that the measure to audit the Federal Reserve is coming under continuous fire from the central bank and its cronies. For the first time since the Federal Reserve was created nearly a century ago, they have hired an actu ...
May 10, 2010
We have been predicting along with others in the alternative media that the drumbeat for further consolidation (of the political kind) within the EU would rise steadily as this latest financial crisis unfolded. We have seen signs of it, though few full-blown ar ...
May 10, 2010
Again, the hypnotic clarion call for more centralization is launched. Being as sensitive to these sorts of promotions as a certain kind of princess is to a pea under a stack of mattresses, we notice when rhetoric resembling a promotion is floated. We were start ...
May 10, 2010
For the country, then, to have developed the pragmatic approach to law and public policy is a tragic contradiction. All of the fundamental ideals and principles that America is known for is rejected by pragmatism and pragmatists. They take them to be myths or, ...
May 09, 2010
The Daily Bell is pleased to present an exclusive interview with Mark Thornton. Thornton is Senior Fellow at the Ludwig von Mises Institute. He serves as the Book Review Editor of the Quarterly Journal of Austrian Economics and as a member of the Editorial Boar ...
May 08, 2010
Greece has gone off the rails, and there are lots of post-mortems being written - especially in the mainstream press - about what went wrong and what could go right. The idea, just as we expected, seems to be that the EU will use this crisis as way of implement ...
May 08, 2010
We always have to start these articles off with the requisite nod to the fierce Gods of Ancient (and Modern) Days. So let's get it out of the way. Here goes ... Goldman is a horrible, smug, abusive institution with obvious ties to the power elite. It may indeed ...
May 08, 2010
Hardly anyone will dispute that most folks who chime in about ethics consider selfishness wrong. There have been exceptions in history and some of the most prominent ethical philosophers, such as Socrates and Aristotle, can even be said to have been ethical ego ...
May 07, 2010
We think the power elite is struggling. We write about this regularly. The Internet has proved a terrible challenge. And partially as a result, the elite's faux-monetary system is compromised; its promotions, generally, are weakening; and people around the worl ...
May 07, 2010
Yesterday, as a kind of aside, we described Merkel as a socialist, and we got some pushback on the topic. We know it's hard to conceive of Merkel as a socialist because the mainstream Anglo-American media describes her as a "conservative." But like all those ru ...
May 06, 2010
Ripples of information and anger spread. Blogs rant about fundamental economic building blocks (see above) and contrarian news aggregators provide information to millions. We wrote an article some time ago that said the incredible bailouts that took place in fr ...
May 06, 2010
Recently we commented on an insightful article in the UK Telegraph that pointed out that Germany was now most obviously the cynosure of the EU, and that the financial crisis had made that clear. But while acknowledging this was true, we wondered if being the ce ...
May 05, 2010
It is often a bit hard to figure out what is going on in the domain of high finance because the reporting is nearly impermeable. But if people understood clearly, they would probably be enraged. This article from Bloomberg is a case in point. What it really is ...
May 05, 2010
We have our doubts. It is indisputably true that a lot of Afghan civilians are being killed by NATO troops and American Marines. And what is also true is that every time an Afghan civilian is killed (even by the Taliban), Americans in particular are blamed – ...
May 05, 2010
Last week Congress did something fiscally responsible. It's not very often I can say that. Granted, it was small in the grand scheme of things, but I was glad to be an original cosponsor, along with Congressman Harry Mitchell of Arizona, of a bill to block the ...
May 05, 2010
So Bill Gates sold me some software when he was still in that business. He was then immensely rich, certainly compared to me. I was not compared to him. How unfair, you say? But Bill took his gains from this trade and used it to feed starving African children, ...
May 04, 2010
Over the weekend, we analyzed a Washington Post article describing the economic crisis in simple but powerful terms. The article maintained that the problem was caused by risky lending and the solution was regulation to impel "banks" to reduce practices that co ...
May 04, 2010
This is a powerful video. Is it a hoax? If it is proves to be true - and not fake or mistranslated - it will go down in the annals of history (unless it goes down the memory hole) as one of the most significant and memorable video documentaries ever created. Ye ...
May 03, 2010
The Bell suggests that investors focus on the most fundamental issue of the 21st century when trying to analyze what's going on in the world from an opportunity standpoint. From our point of view this fundamental issue is the collision between the Internet and ...
May 03, 2010
This Washington Post story is a great example of how the mainstream media goes about supporting a power elite dominant social theme. In this case the fear-based promotion is that there will be another financial meltdown if "reform" isn't enacted. And to put the ...
May 03, 2010
In numerous areas of human life treating people in nearly exactly the same way may make sense. Thus, for example, when you go to your dentist, you are probably implored to floss – and so is everyone else who visits dentists. Other doctors, too, will prescribe ...
May 02, 2010
The Daily Bell is pleased to present an exclusive interview with Robert Higgs. Higgs is Senior Fellow in Political Economy for The Independent Institute and Editor of the Institute's quarterly journal The Independent Review. He received his Ph.D. in economics f ...
May 01, 2010
This article appearing recently at the Huffington Post by James Bacchus, a "former member of Congress," is noteworthy because it musters all the arguments against a Federal Reserve audit and, generally, Fed transparency. While Ron Paul (R-Tex) and others have b ...
May 01, 2010
We blame American oil companies for this most recent oil spill, but not for the predictable reasons. American oil companies, in our opinion, have helped set up a situation where there is a substantial amount of oil production offshore, even though there doesn't ...
May 01, 2010
The idea that making a profit is somehow ignoble has ancient roots. Partly it stems from the utterly fallacious notion that when someone wins, someone else must lose. So if you go to the mall and purchase a sweater you really like, you must rip off the store wh ...
May 01, 2010
We truly live in a convoluted and strangely chaotic world. This last week alone has been a mix of all kinds of 'Updates' -worthy matters to discuss, one interlinked with the other. Where should I start??? Goldman Sachs? Eyjafjallajokull (the ominous volcano in ...
April 30, 2010
We promised ourselves not to write about the Greek/Euro crisis again for a couple of days, but we can't help but return to it when we see articles like the one excerpted above. In our view, the Greek crisis seems designed to provide real-life examples of what w ...
April 30, 2010
We've been reading the reactions to the Arizona anti-immigrant bill, and we've seen how the bill is being utilized to ignite a seeming groundswell of support for upcoming immigration legislation planned by the administration. Arizona's new law makes it easier t ...
April 29, 2010
To the degree that these elites will use the financial crisis to further concentrate power and wealth, we think that increased, monetary chaos is a possibility. If, on the other hand, national economic elites allow a semblance of a marketplace for money to oper ...
April 29, 2010
We agree with Eric Sprott about gold, or at least as his comments are reported in the above excerpted article. And of course we take into account that his optimism is colored by his launch of a gold hedge fund with a perceived superiority because investors can ...
April 29, 2010
Enthusiasts for increasing government regulations of people in business, including those in the financial markets, never bother to answer the one basic question that any rational person would need to have answered before joining them as champions of their propo ...
April 28, 2010
US Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner doesn't want to be seen as being affiliated with Wall Street, and we can't blame him. But what's odd from our perspective is that he does want to be known for being associated with "public service." We think this is very r ...
April 28, 2010
Immigration is one of the most politicized issues of the modern nation-state. We would have preferred if Napolitano had offered up a libertarian position rather than a political one, as this sort of analysis only further reinforces people's perception that the ...
April 27, 2010
We think President Barack Obama's statement that the upcoming US financial regulation bill could end boom-and-bust cycles is an unfortunate one. It illustrates a fundamental rhetorical dishonesty, because even the socialist economist John Maynard Keynes did not ...
April 27, 2010
We, too, believe that the Afghanistan war is winding down. Maybe the US military would like to continue it a while longer, but the home populations of the Dutch, the Canadians, the Germans, and even the British, are evermore opposed to it. From our point of vie ...
April 27, 2010
Lately many have characterized this administration as socialist, or having strong socialist leanings. I differ with this characterization. This is not to say Mr. Obama believes in free-markets by any means. On the contrary, he has done and said much that demons ...
April 27, 2010
Here we have a blatantly misleading assessment of a free society as well as men and women in such a society. Yes, Honderich is right that no one has an enforceable claim on other people providing food for them. There is in such a country no legal right to be su ...
April 26, 2010
So small banks want to retain the Federal Reserve as their regulator. We wonder why. It could be that the alternative the Dodd bill is offering is worse, but the article, excerpted above, taken on face value is somewhat bizarre to say the least. What did the Fe ...
April 26, 2010
The controversy around 9/11 is nearly a decade old now but it will not subside. People like David Ray Griffin continue to be in demand from a speaking standpoint and the amount of people who don't believe in the official 9/11 story may amount to as much as one- ...
April 25, 2010
The Daily Bell is pleased to present an exclusive interview with Douglas French. Mr. French is president of the Mises Institute and author of Early Speculative Bubbles & Increases in the Money Supply. He received his Masters degree in economics from the Univers ...
April 24, 2010
The news in this article, excerpted above, has hit the US blogosphere hard. Throughout Friday, there were more and more comments, like an inflowing tide – as could be seen if one did a little bit of research on Google. What was it in the article that caused s ...
April 24, 2010
As America sinks deeper into the tyranny of bureaucratic corporatism via today's incestuous relationship between Washington and Wall Street, it is understandable why many among the citizenry have become disgusted, and it is gratifying that thousands of Tea Part ...
April 24, 2010
Indeed, it seems to be common sense to worry about investing government with all the power being advocate for it now by Mr. Obama and Co., since, to put the matter simply, there is no reason to think that those who are the government possess any superior virtue ...
April 23, 2010
How did the world's biggest republic come to this pass? Twenty-five years ago, it seemed that America was indeed a shining light on a hill, or at least moreso than it had been for some time. The nation's rhetoric was shaped by its most libertarian president in ...
April 23, 2010
There are many reasons why James Murdoch, the son of perhaps the most powerful media mogul in the world, might have wanted to confront his father's detractors. It could simply have been personal pique or perhaps he could have had some sort of professional or co ...
April 22, 2010
In the best of all worlds, money itself would be privatized through the adoption, perhaps, of free-banking and the resultant evolution of a private gold and silver standard. People would rely on competition and private (common law) to sort out grievances having ...
