STAFF NEWS & ANALYSIS
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October 20, 2008
It is hard to see through the vagueness to exactly what is being called for, but no doubt whatever takes place will do nothing to address the root cause of the current economic crisis. Those who are most forceful in calling for "reform" – whatever that is – ...
October 17, 2008
Being part of a publishing company based in Switzerland, we doubt the average citizen is going to be especially pleased with what is going on in its storied banking business. The Swiss are an industrious people to be sure, but above all what Switzerland provide ...
October 16, 2008
Actually, it is starting to seem as if Bernanke will say virtually anything to sound like he knows what he is doing. But what he's saying seems to get increasingly bizarre. Alan Greenspan, Bernanke's predecessor was always talking about asset bubbles (even if h ...
October 15, 2008
The kind of soft socialism that has been ushered in with the latest and most expansive US government involvement in the private sector is un-American in a fundamental sense. If one subscribes to the idea that America was once the world's most powerful and produ ...
October 14, 2008
One would not have predicted years ago that the current American administration would be taking $125 billion-plus position in America's largest investment banks (eventually, we will see how much it really is), and dictating the terms as well. That this is takin ...
October 13, 2008
Thanks to the current credit crisis, which is actually a crisis of Western "fiat" money, UK Prime Minister Gordon Brown has seemingly made a comeback in popular opinion. Popular opinion had previously been running heavily against Brown, who succeeded the increa ...
October 10, 2008
Evans-Pritchard is one of the better mainstream economic commentators, and he has been hitting the economic crisis hard. He certainly has hard-money sympathies, and he has written on one occasion or another that the only currency worth owning right now is bulli ...
October 09, 2008
As part of what we hope could be considered a public service, we continue to report on calls for ever deeper and more invasive regulatory fixes, worldwide. These efforts are usually accompanied by melancholy protestations of sincerity. And the breast-beating an ...
October 08, 2008
From farce to tragedy? This is what happens when free-markets are overtaken by uncontrolled cronyism and corruption. A 35-year-old gets tapped to run a US$700 billion bailout fund that is supposed to save the American economy and thus the world's financial syst ...
October 07, 2008
A funny thing happened on the way to a commodity collapse. Gold went up. As part of the endless attack on money metals by the monetary elite, the idea that gold and silver are "commodities" has been another arrow in the quiver of honest-money negativity. But go ...
October 06, 2008
We began to predict calls long ago for more international regulation based on the current "financial crisis." Our perception of what was bound to occur has indeed come true in various regions. Take the United States. Here, the Democrats have been gearing up for ...
October 03, 2008
It must be great for those of the "Swiss persuasion" who identify with large banks to see that UBS is back on track. Everything sounds really good. After a loss of only US$43 billion, the great Swiss bank has turned the corner. Its management expects it to be p ...
October 02, 2008
Global capital flows have indeed transformed the American economy, and other Western economies as well. But where do these capital flows come from? Watching the American debate over the economy has been dispiriting because even with the addition of the recent L ...
October 01, 2008
Except what is "good " for some may not be good for all, or even many. The contraction of banking in the United States proceeds apace with that country's largest banks merging one after the other. What is most fascinating about the consolidation is that it begi ...
September 30, 2008
We are pleased to present the above excerpt because it dovetails neatly with a point we made recently - that there is probably no question now that precious metals markets are highly manipulated and that this ongoing manipulation will eventually render these ma ...
September 29, 2008
It has long been our contention that the world remains on a de facto gold and silver standard, even if many of the people in it don't understand the reality of the money they use. This money is supposedly guaranteed by the "full faith and credit" of the state. ...
September 26, 2008
e wrote about how Europeans seemed a little smug recently when being quoted about the problems in the US. What the problems come down to, in our estimation, is that the Federal Reserve carried on with a loose money policy for so long that it created a euphoria ...
September 25, 2008
US President Bush hit the airwaves last night to hype the administration's $700 billion bailout of America's largest financial firms. He spent a good deal of time explaining the reason why the nation was in the fix it is in. He explained that a large influx of ...
September 24, 2008
The avalanche of finger-pointing has begun and will not cease for several decades, if then. But the above excerpt is from an article that is among the best of the most recent crop, in that it actually attacks the Federal Reserve rather than "greed" or "Wall Str ...
September 23, 2008
On and on, high finance will go. OK, maybe. But one thing is fairly certain: The frustration of America's lenders will go on and on. The Chinese alone are on the hook for something like a trillion dollars of American Treasurys. In fact, you would think some of ...
September 22, 2008
Goodness, it didn't take very long to realize our prediction that the current debacle would be used as a way to further "globalize" domestic financial systems, especially America's. And so long as we're keeping track (and we do), we wish note once more, as we h ...
September 19, 2008
In a free market, participants would be free to buy or sell securities as they wished. Patently, as we have learned once again in the past weeks and months, the securities marketplace is not "free" and in fact is basically a kind of colony of the American Feder ...
September 18, 2008
It didn't make sense to us that gold and silver would be lapsing into a bear market, given both the amount of money that central banks are throwing at the markets and the amount of nervousness as well. And while yesterday's price action might be aberrant, we wo ...
September 17, 2008
We are big fans of Dr. Gary North, and this is an interesting article that we have excerpted above. Dr. North now seems to believe that the best days of the gold (and silver) bull market may be past and that the future holds only gradual deflation. Wow. That's ...
September 16, 2008
Some win, some lose – and Wall Street will continue. Because Wall Street is in such flux, this first article will focus on the proverbial "big picture." (That's why you read The Bell after all, isn't it?) In fact, whether firm X is purchased, or firm Y is "sa ...
September 15, 2008
Thanks to Fortune for this insightful analysis. We just don't buy it. For us, Wall Street was always something of a dream, a sometimes languid and sometimes frenetic slumber ongoing for a very long time – longer than we have been around – nearly a century. ...
September 12, 2008
There is no doubt that the Russians are angry with the way the United States has acted within a "unipolar" world. First the Clinton administration and then the Bush administration have pursued wars near Russia while trying to woo countries that have traditional ...
September 11, 2008
You can argue as many do that central banking is a benign and necessary activity. Our take is that central banking is a destructive force because central bankers never know how much money is too much. And because the central bank always prints too much money, i ...
September 10, 2008
Sorry to return to the Fannie and Freddie bailout once again, but the totality of mortgages held by these two monsters is in excess of $6 trillion. The United States, in taking over these "companies" has basically socialized a major portion of its internal mark ...
September 09, 2008
And so the myth of the savvy banker rolls on. You would think after decades of implosions, bankruptcies and general mayhem around the world that bankers might offer up a little humility alongside the inevitable gravitas. But such is not the case. These bankers ...
September 08, 2008
What free market ideology? The United States has a $3 trillion federal budget, a national debt the size of a black hole and a graduated income tax that drains wealth from the middle class (mostly) for the benefit of the wealthy. That Fannie and Freddie are to b ...
September 05, 2008
There is probably never a single good reason for equities in America or elsewhere to go either up or down. Trying to attribute a single, neat reason is a little like attributing a particular emotion or reason to "national will." Having said this, there are cert ...
September 04, 2008
We've discussed the disturbing effects of central banking on American society many times in these pages. Certainly, the mechanism of central banking, its ability to print money out of nothing, has been in large part responsible for the shocking bloat of the US ...
September 03, 2008
The Swiss are doing their best to maintain their reputation as conservative bankers in a world that seems to be seeing one major financial institution after another tottering on the edge of ruin. But the only trouble with the Swiss insistence on retaining tradi ...
September 02, 2008
In this Investors Business Daily article written in July before Palin was picked as US Senator John McCain's VP candidate, the soon-to-be nominee expresses considerable frustration about the "nonsensical" position of the federal government as regards drilling i ...
September 01, 2008
While it is clear that top American officials will find some way of funding America's extensive debts, the lengths to which the central banking bureaucracy is willing to go is surprising in our estimation. What the above excerpt indicates is that US debt is bei ...
August 29, 2008
We've stated that the Internet has aggravated the ferocity of this latest financial "crisis" in that it has come on harder and sooner than any hypothetical global elite might have preferred. But that doesn't mean, contrary to the article above, that those somew ...
August 28, 2008
The kind of privatization that is being considered by American governments these days is actually not a return to the private marketplace that defined America during its wealth-creating heyday. Privatization actually means the provision of services by private e ...
August 27, 2008
The trade agreements that have been negotiated over the past years by the East and West have tended to benefit the very largest manufacturers and marketers, many of the West. One of the beneficial effects of the rise of the Internet – and its culture of free- ...
August 26, 2008
Or is it? Maybe this is big news, confirming what we have long suspected – that the world still runs on a "kinda-sorta" gold standard, whether super-financiers want to admit it or not. How is this possible? Just because there is not a formal agreement doesn't ...
August 25, 2008
This is an astounding statement. It intimates that Keynesian "wage push" is a primary factor in a "wage-price" spiral. Yet inflation, as serious modern-day economists agree, is a monetary phenomenon. To indicate that a "wage-price" spiral can aggravate an infla ...
August 22, 2008
The big boys who play in high waters probably never expected things to get so bad so quickly. It is beyond reason to think that those at the very top did not understand the breadth of the bubble and its intricacy – but timing is always tricky, as any investor ...
August 21, 2008
In fact, it is one thing to file a suit in court and not receive satisfaction. It is another to have a ruling that makes it nearly impossible to achieve any just compensation right from the start. The Canadian courts, thus far, have made it very difficult for s ...
August 20, 2008
Almost every day now comes word of a new glitch, a new hold up. Gold and silver are harder and harder to come by. Such scarcity remains explainable, at least if you believe the rationales. The US Mint for instance has seemingly stopped selling both gold and sil ...
August 19, 2008
Thank goodness! Switzerland's central bank is going to make sure that Swiss banks have more assets to cover risk – and that they can't leverage their riskiest lending. These decisions are aimed in part at the giant Swiss bank UBS which has taken tens of billi ...
August 18, 2008
We've pointed out before that we think the search for oil and gas is more "racket" than real – and we're not dissuaded by the latest news coming out of Russia. Imagine, with all the oil and gas that there apparently is in the world, the great Western companie ...
August 15, 2008
All right, perhaps Americans aren't so smart when it comes to their Constitution, but at least they'll leave the Internet out of it. And it can't be that bad anyway, over there, since they're still free to poll. So let us ask the correct question: Who exactly i ...
August 14, 2008
The Olympics ... Big business! Big money! And yes, big politics, too. No matter what former President Bush says, politics are inextricably linked to the games; in fact, it says a great deal that both Bushes, current president and former president, showed up in ...
August 13, 2008
Doesn't this seem more and more to resemble some kind of high-level money transfer? Trouble is, it's so complex and occurs with so much money that regulators will probably never get around to figuring it out. Or more likely, everyone upstairs has already figure ...
August 12, 2008
Of course, there are varying opinions about the current fighting between Russia and Georgia these days. The Internet is crackling with them. The Internet in fact is a wonderful device. If it had been present during the First World War, the reasons for that endl ...
