STAFF NEWS & ANALYSIS
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December 29, 2014
We are often critical of Bloomberg, but this is a pretty good editorial. At least we agree with part of it! We've been writing regularly about the inflation versus deflation debate and here comes Bloomberg taking an astonishingly clear-eyed position. Here's mor ...
December 29, 2014
One hundred years ago last week, on Christmas Eve, 1914, German and British soldiers emerged from the horrors of World War One trench warfare to greet each other, exchange food and gifts, and to wish each other a Merry Christmas. What we remember now as the "Ch ...
December 28, 2014
They're selling the Trans-Pacific Partnership and its European sister, the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership, as though they're trade deals and they're not. It's a multinational takeover. There are plenty of trade deals in place, and it's estimated ...
December 27, 2014
We've posted variations of the following editorial around Christmastime on several occasions, most recently in 2013. It commemorates the famous reply to a letter from little Virginia way back in 1897, entitled, "Yes, Virginia, There Is a Santa Claus." Eight-yea ...
December 26, 2014
Our suspicions about the Sony hack were raised when North Korea accused the US of involving its CIA. By then the story had been continuously presented by the mainstream media, always a sign that some sort of promotion was underway. And now the next shoe has dro ...
December 26, 2014
This editorial informs us that people may be surprised what happens regarding cannabis next year ... legalization at a federal level. Are you surprised? Certainly, the Republican takeover of Congress may be widely seen as an impediment to further drug legalizat ...
December 26, 2014
The entire world is watching Putin play poker with the Western politicians lead by Obama and followed by Washington quislings in London, Brussels and Berlin. America's goal since the end of the Cold War has been to weaken by financial, economic and, if necessar ...
December 25, 2014
We checked 'Net search engines but there was little this year about the consumerist backlash against Christmas. We know it exists, but the mainstream media doesn't seem to be in the mood to comment on it. Then this recent MarketWatch article turned up. It estim ...
December 25, 2014
Robert Reich is back with his usual optimism about fixing Leviathan – see the above article excerpt. Who is Robert Reich? He is "the nation's 22nd Secretary of Labor and a professor at the University of California at Berkeley. His film 'Inequality for All' is ...
December 25, 2014
Every Christmas reminds me of an anonymous act of kindness that changed my life. I have no one to thank. I don't know if my good Samaritan was white or black, male or female. It was an act of pure compassion that did not seek even the reward of recognition. It ...
December 24, 2014
You would think that this market would already have foundered. The US recovery is suspect. Government price inflation numbers and employment numbers are unreliable at best. Most importantly, this stock market boom has been going on since late 2009. That's aroun ...
December 24, 2014
For years we had arguments with "peak oilers" who maintained that the world was running out of oil. Of course, they always objected to this simplified version of their arguments. Peak oilers liked to clothe their arguments in intricate statistics. The only peop ...
December 23, 2014
We can see in this Bloomberg editorial how central banks and their good, gray leaders are going to be positioned going forward. Assume that the US and Britain are in a "recovery" of sorts. Now mainstream pundits such as those that populate Bloomberg are going t ...
December 23, 2014
It looks as if the just-released report on the CIA and torture has blown up this tragic issue in a very public manner. And now, one way or another, the "establishment" has to deal with it. We dealt with this yesterday in our lead article entitled, "US Power Cen ...
December 23, 2014
At a time of the year when gift giving and charitable good spirit fills the air, please allow me to be the one who rains on the parade: "Yes, Virginia, there is no Santa Claus!" I don't mean the Santa who comes down the chimney with toys for every girl and boy. ...
December 23, 2014
The Federal Reserve and its bullion bank agents are actively using uncovered futures contracts to illegally manipulate the prices of precious metals in order to keep interest rates below the market rate. The purpose of manipulation is to support the U.S. dollar ...
December 22, 2014
The US is splitting apart: Some 60 years of expanding authoritarianism has created political and economic facilities that are now beginning to face off against each other. There are dozens of intel agencies, hundreds of military specializations, vast bureaucrac ...
December 22, 2014
Recently, High Alert announced the opening of an expat community in Colombia in an editorial by Anthony Wile, here: A New Free-Thinking Community for Your Life, Safety and Sanity! While the editorial was greeted with an overwhelmingly positive response, some of ...
December 22, 2014
Last week we learned that the key to a strong economy is not increased production, lower unemployment, or a sound monetary unit. Rather, economic prosperity depends on the type of language used by the central bank in its monetary policy statements. All it took ...
December 21, 2014
In my sophomore year of college, I came up with the basic outline of what needed to be done: a curriculum tied to Western civilization and Austrian School economics. That was in 1960. In the late 1960s, I was a teaching assistant in the Western Civ program of t ...
December 20, 2014
I noticed an article by David Stockman, "Central Banks Are Now Uncorking The Delirium Phase," and I want to comment on it because he shed light on some of the same conclusions we've come to regarding this ongoing "Wall Street Party." Stockman also makes a case ...
December 19, 2014
The Fed has signaled that it has moved to a slightly tougher position regarding eventual rate hikes and the reverberations are felt around the world. The dollar has benefited so far and so have US stocks. But are the reasons being offered in the mainstream medi ...
December 19, 2014
We've mentioned that Reuters columnist Noah Smith is a "gift that keeps on giving." He's back with another such gift in this column, "Maybe There's No Such Thing as a Business Cycle." Actually, the article promises a bit more than it delivers. Smith doesn't act ...
December 18, 2014
The tech bubble of 2000 led directly to the crisis of 2008 because after 2000 central banks radically dropped rates and began to swell the monetary base. And now they are doing it again. There was, of course, a bobble when Ben Bernanke raised rates and we've of ...
December 18, 2014
Think of inflation as fire and deflation as ice. How will this latest asset reflation end? Will it subside into ice – a tremendous monetary and price deflation? Or will the current asset expansion continue into a catastrophe of fire? Often, as we've pointed o ...
December 18, 2014
Everyone has heard the statistic. One in five female students will be raped during her time on campus. Only they won't because the rate of campus rape is far, far lower and it is consistently falling. A Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS) report disproves the 1- ...
December 18, 2014
Financial Imperialists Attack Russia: A dangerous new trend is the successful manipulation of the financial markets by the Federal Reserve, other central banks, private banks, and the US Treasury. The Federal Reserve reduced real interest rates on US government ...
December 17, 2014
Bloomberg was in full cry last night regarding a failing Russian economy. We've never seen anything like it on Bloomberg: The front page of the website carried a box on the top left hand corner filled with blaring stories. It is this latter editorial that we ar ...
December 17, 2014
In the Internet era it is increasingly difficult to actualize dominant social themes. An "actualization," of course, is a news story showing the validity of the meme or theme. Several years ago, the mainstream media tried to actualize the "thoughtless and bruta ...
December 16, 2014
A recent article of ours made the point that deflation and disinflation are unstable monetary states in an era of central banking. While we didn't draw precise definitional lines between various kinds of deflation, our point was clear enough: Deflation and disi ...
December 16, 2014
Warm weather often promises an abundance of food. But for global warming promoters, warmer weather is to be feared. Purposefully or not, "scientific" research, media reports and over-regulation form an unholy triangle of food scarcity. Simplify the explanation ...
December 16, 2014
A specter is haunting the world, the specter of two percent inflationism. Whether pronounced by the U.S. Federal Reserve or the European Central Bank, or from the Bank of Japan, many monetary central planners have declared their determination to impose a certai ...
December 15, 2014
This is an absurd article. US lifestyles and retirement possibilities have been on a downward arc since at least the turn of the century. And if one goes back and compares the 1950s to the present day, the current financial environment looks even worse. Since 1 ...
December 15, 2014
Gavin Seim and people like him are perhaps the fruit of this Internet era. They are educated and fervent about protecting constitutional freedoms. Yet there is a big difference between understanding what has been lost and regaining it. Seim is already on the ra ...
December 15, 2014
The political class breathed a sigh of relief Saturday when the US Senate averted a government shutdown by passing the $1.1 trillion omnibus spending bill. This year's omnibus resembles omnibuses of Christmas past in that it was drafted in secret, was full of s ...
December 14, 2014
I'm still extremely optimistic about agriculture, more so than many sectors of the world economy. … If you want to invest in agriculture, the best thing you should do is become a farmer. Buy yourself some land and become a farmer if you'd be any good at it †...
December 13, 2014
A recent article in The Market Oracle caught my eye: "Largest Financial Bubble in History – 10 years of 'Why Sell Now?' " The article was written this past week during a powerfully slumping market that trimmed hundreds of points off the Dow Jones industrial a ...
December 12, 2014
The idea behind this article is that openness is good and more openness is even better. The article makes a pretense of asking whether this is a sensible conclusion, but at the heart of the article is an argument for more transparency. The idea is that governme ...
December 12, 2014
Richard Gingras, Head of Google News, posted this update on Thursday, explaining that Google News would have to close in Spain. That's because Spanish legislators have decided that any time someone reproduces even a few words of someone else's writing, it is no ...
December 11, 2014
This is huge news, and it's definitely launched in a big way on the mainstream media. As of this writing, the situation is still in flux but from what we've read this legislation is taking place. Even if it doesn't happen this time, it's part of a trend that wi ...
December 11, 2014
This is a case of one step forward, one step backward when it comes to cannabis legalization. But in a sense the two occurrences we'll discuss here shed some light on the larger mechanism of legalization now taking place. The first occurrence is Congress steppi ...
December 11, 2014
A rape culture dogma has been created in North America by politically-correct (PC) feminists who claim sexual assault against women is a systemic problem throughout society. It does not matter that rape is a heavily punished crime or that the mere accusation of ...
December 10, 2014
The contradictions of the current "bull" market worldwide are catching up with the averages. Call it an equity "cognitive dissonance." Understandable turmoil in Greece combined with the puncturing of an "exuberant" Chinese stock market caused a sudden global se ...
December 10, 2014
So now it is general knowledge that the US tortured throughout the Bush administration ... and beyond. The publication of this information by the Senate Intelligence Committee is generating a massive wave of indignation around the world. The US has long been se ...
December 10, 2014
"First, let me try to tell you about the setting of the Terra Viva, or Living Earth, community in such a way that I can convey even an inkling of the spectacular appeal of this magical place." Anthony Wile. Yes, Anthony is a great writer and this sounds like a ...
December 09, 2014
This is an interesting meme. Economists ARE influential, though not for the reasons that The Economist enumerates. In fact, we can make an argument that modern mainstream economics is entirely a manufactured science: in the past we've done just that. Anyway, th ...
December 09, 2014
This interesting survey confirms what has seemed obvious to us and our readers for years: That the 'Net is making people more informed, not less. This has proven to be, in our view, an unstoppable process and one that is sparking major social changes. We track ...
December 09, 2014
There has been no greater threat to life, liberty, and property throughout the ages than government. Even the most violent and brutal private individuals have been able to inflict only a mere fraction of the harm and destruction that have been caused by the use ...
December 08, 2014
Wow. We've been banging the drum regarding the shady manipulations of Europe's founders for years now. But it looks as if those who have ignored this sordid history are gradually giving in. That's how life works in the Internet era. 'Net exposure eventually col ...
December 08, 2014
So it begins. In fact, we asked the question quite a while ago regarding the thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands in jail for using cannabis. "Where is the justice?" we asked. By phrasing the question this way, we positioned it as moral issue. And, yes, the ...
