STAFF NEWS & ANALYSIS
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February 09, 2009
What does China need to do now? The answer apparently is that it will provide goods and services at a faster rate to its own population. Whether this is feasible is yet another question, but China's aging leaders have decided to try. They need to do something a ...
February 06, 2009
Yesterday we analyzed a Herald article that indicated the citizens of Iceland were irritated that the central bank hadn't properly reined in their commercial banks. We pointed out that it was rather more likely that those in Iceland were annoyed with the centra ...
February 05, 2009
OK, we know how hideous the Russians are. Vladimir Putin has been nationalizing everything in sight, and what he doesn't nationalize the KGB (or whatever it is called now) beats into a pulp, especially reporters. But nonetheless, the above article excerpt makes ...
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February 04, 2009
Are you a confused denizen of the West – or East for that matter? You can hardly be blamed if you are puzzled by headlines and stories such as these. Normal people go to work, make a living and try to save what they can. They may own a house, a car and have s ...
February 03, 2009
The SMH article, excerpted above, in its entirety is filled with one odd factoid after another. But we find it interesting because we've been waiting for a statement about how the center-left leaders that run most of the world's Western governments these days a ...
February 02, 2009
For regular readers of the Bell, such difficulty is hard to fathom. Here is what even such great minds as those that blessed Davos ought to consider: Cut taxes drastically; cut government spending drastically; reduce central banking activities as much as possib ...
January 30, 2009
The salient point of this article is that "tempers flair," and that if the United States pushes China too hard, the Chinese leaders will dump Treasuries on the market and in doing so break the fiscal back of the free world. Of course maybe it isn't so simple as ...
January 29, 2009
What the heck are multiple reserve currencies? In fact, what's a reserve currency anyway? It's actually a post World War II development, courtesy of Bretton Woods that made the dollar the world's most accepted money. At the time, countries were still gasping al ...
January 28, 2009
We can't shake the feeling that there is more at work here than irritation with the Swiss - or a need for additional US taxpayer funds, or even a determination to punish miscreants. We can't prove it, but it strikes us that the financial crisis is being used to ...
January 27, 2009
One of the illuminating experiences of living through a fiat-money crash is to see how the system perpetuates itself, even though the system itself may be at least partially at fault. This article, excerpted above, is a beautiful example, our estimation, of pro ...
January 26, 2009
One hardly knows where to begin. China is manipulating its currency? That's rich. What about the European Union and America? What is a central banking economy if not an ongoing manipulation? How are market forces at work - when central bankers themselves determ ...
January 23, 2009
While Obama's planned stimulus package does have a kind of tax-cutting component, it is not exceptionally strong or clear-cut. If passed, his tax cuts would likely be akin to standing in a category five hurricane with an umbrella and expecting it to help. And ...
January 22, 2009
Some have indicated a discomfort with a rush to judgment as regards America's brand new president – Barack Obama. In fact, we would have to plead guilty – not to a rush to judgment perhaps, but certainly to having a certain discomfort with the kind of cult ...
January 21, 2009
Just so we don't depress our readers too much, let us state for the record that there are things to be done, only Gordon Brown and his brain trust aren't doing them. As they could be done in America, by the way, only Obama probably won't do them, either (sorry, ...
January 20, 2009
Obama's appeal is obviously based on his good looks, youth and energy. It is also based, at least partly, on his low-key personal style and, importantly, on a very calculated campaign that has tended to emphasize generalities. His clever approach has been to pr ...
January 19, 2009
We've seen how the EU is evolving. Its socialist leaders seem to want a USSR-lite. They just sued Microsoft again and they haven't given up on the idea of a full-fledged constitution, a standing army, etc. Brussels, the supposed example for how Europe's tribes ...
January 16, 2009
It is especially interesting to see how quickly the state and its leaders are willing to jettison the burning issues that provided until recently a raison d'etre for its existence. "It doesn't make any sense to talk about education, infrastructure, water, healt ...
January 15, 2009
Of course, to listen to the constant din of post mortems, nothing really went wrong recently but regulation. Had the American Democrat/Republicans not done as they did, then everything would have been OK. Thus, out of the woodwork have emerged all sorts of pres ...
January 14, 2009
We're not sure what to make of this one. We thought the pump-priming for an Iranian war had slowed. No more build-up, no more almost daily reports about the insanity of the Iranian mullahs or the rapid expansion of their nuclear program. But now comes Newsmax w ...
January 13, 2009
Now Germany, despite its leaders' protestations, has followed France, England and the United States off the cliff and into a dangerous sea of free-spending and monetary expansion that should likely retard recovery. As we pointed out yesterday, courtesy of free- ...
January 12, 2009
Reisman reminds us of something very important: Just as inflation in free market terms is an expansion in the money supply, so deflation is a decrease in the money supply - and both of these events are likely natural within a larger business cycle. But as Reism ...
January 09, 2009
The sad thing, given what looms, is that the middle class is due for a severe case of whiplash – something else we have in fact mentioned in the past. The potential crack up – giving rise to the initial whiplash – began in 2008 with the deleveraging of Am ...
January 08, 2009
We've read stories reporting the Chinese are going to dump close to US$1 trillion in American debt, and we never found that too convincing. Doesn't make much sense to dump everything you bought on the market all at once – unless you want to take a mighty big ...
January 07, 2009
Being supporters of a free-market oriented publication with a strong belief in the saving graces of gold and silver, we keep waiting for ringing endorsements of precious metals in the mainstream media. This article would have provided a good opportunity - but i ...
January 06, 2009
Gradually, ineluctably, the finger-pointing is diminishing as the reality of what is going on in America and the rest of the Western world is sinking in. There is less talk about why this regulation or that regulation created the biggest modern crisis in Wester ...
January 05, 2009
We are supposed to mourn the plight that the central bank finds itself in? Don't think we do. The best thing that could probably happen would be if people in the great country of America decided that their central bank is just as bad as Thomas Jefferson and And ...
January 02, 2009
The bias in the mainstream reporting as regards gold and silver is obvious, to us, anyway. In fact, we have a suspicion (oft stated) that central banks and the principals of complaisant markets will do almost anything to keep a lid on precious metals. (Please n ...
January 01, 2009
The largest economic debacles that face the world on a regular basis are usually the result of government policies, deliberate or otherwise. Even the long-ago Tulipomania of Amsterdam can apparently be seen within the context of certain adjustments that were im ...
December 31, 2008
Tom Daschle is among the most partisan of notable American Democrats, and his appointment by Barack Obama as secretary of health and human services puts the nation on notice that health-care reform is an administration priority. Yet curing health-care problems ...
December 30, 2008
Of course this seems a bit like barring the barn door a bit too late. How refreshing it would be to hear a regulator or Wall Street denizen admit that the entire financial-regulatory structure of 20th century securities enforcement is a bit flawed. Let's not ho ...
December 29, 2008
History shows us that so many of science's greatest breakthroughs were made by mavericks, outliers with little mainstream exposure. This is at it should be. Government likely can no more create scientific breakthroughs by throwing money at approved scientists a ...
December 26, 2008
Again, we have a technical analysis of a too-real difficulty – Britain's ongoing, slow-motion economic collapse. Britain was once the industrial engine of the world. The sun never set on her empire. But after two world wars and 50 years of intermittent but in ...
December 25, 2008
What do we hope for? How about a more enlightened leadership that understands the efficacy of free markets and the difficulties of fiat money. It is an ineluctable law in life that something cannot be derived from nothing; the ability to coin money from thin ai ...
December 24, 2008
The idea that lawsuits will fly over the Madoff fraud is hardly newsworthy of itself, but the idea that a regulatory body may be sued is news indeed. The Western regulatory structure usually puts regulators beyond the consequences of either actions or results. ...
December 23, 2008
Does it begin to come clear? Despite the above positives, what we have here is unfortunately one more in a series of analyses by the Western mainstream press that spells out the dangers of increased state interference in markets - but makes such seem inevitable ...
December 22, 2008
One can get whiplash taking all of this in and when we are finished with the article we know little more than when we began – except that public/private partnerships are the cause of Western prosperity and that America should never have abandoned them. What t ...
December 19, 2008
Sometimes it seems as if the Federal Reserve has set up a bailout fund for almost every kind of securitized instrument. The underlying conversation finally becomes whether any of these products had lasting value. The answer is that they should have had; but so ...
December 18, 2008
The Fed is going to buy up securities to push up prices – and this quantitative easing is intended to replicate the Japanese pseudo-success with that deleveraged economy in the 2000s. The idea, though, for which the Fed wants to gain credit is that while it t ...
December 17, 2008
One believes that the Western monetary leadership is focused on the economic crisis more clearly these days. But whether it makes any difference is not so clear. Ultimately, what has occurred is that the distortion of the economic system due to an ongoing overs ...
December 16, 2008
Tensions are rising, not just in South America. The Western world is abuzz with dire predictions these days, much of which can be traced to the changing of the guard in the American White House. Many of the more paranoid perspectives – finding outlets then as ...
December 15, 2008
What is behind all the pressure on tax havens? The common analysis holds that Western governments are stressed, so they need the money, and tax havens have it. But surely this pressure has been going on for a while. In fact, it is our belief that the current ec ...
December 12, 2008
This is a much bigger story than it seems – and it is one that will not ever be reported in all its breadth and depth because much of the ramifications will be hidden, the way the tremendous power of the New York money establishment is hidden. ...
December 11, 2008
The World Bank, a profoundly anti-democratic and anti-market entity is turning away from market solutions to the intractable problems of hunger and poverty. This is damaging enough. But by avoiding a discussion of what central banks do to inflate the money supp ...
December 10, 2008
To use public works programs as a cover for the creation of political unpopular infrastructure and bureaucratic expansion will likely prove unpopular in certain areas and with certain interest groups that have already mustered considerable resistance. If it tur ...
December 09, 2008
What was Zell thinking a year ago? That the economy was going to bounce back from whatever it was starting to go through? Nonetheless, he went ahead and made a big acquisition that he can't handle now in the deteriorating business environment. And we're not any ...
December 08, 2008
It stands to reason. If indeed some derivatives deals are already headed south, then a US$500 trillion market is in jeopardy. Where one transaction can go, others can follow. The central banking mechanisms around the world that stand ready to support institutio ...
December 05, 2008
There is an increasingly contagious supposition that the Chinese, sooner or later, are fixing to offer the world the next reserve currency – and it is obviously being fanned by the Chinese themselves. But not so fast. We believe that Chinese currency, like th ...
December 04, 2008
It certainly seems true that offshore tax havens redirect funds that would otherwise go to American and European Union coffers. But from a free-market standpoint, taxes are methodology of control in a central-banking economy more than a necessity (as the centr ...
December 03, 2008
It sounds reasonable; but let us examine this premise in a little more detail. First of all, how much of American infrastructure is "necessary - how much was built in response to market forces and how much was built in a way that markets would have organized. A ...
December 02, 2008
The current economic crisis will hit American towns and cities hard and it will be interesting to see how much Federal largesse will trickle down to the states and the local level. The infection of the graduated income tax, which became law on a federal level i ...
