STAFF NEWS & ANALYSIS Showing 3601 - 2 of 2
Regulate the Regulators – Or Reduce Them?
February 18, 2015
This is one of those articles that in our humble opinion starts with a false premise, one that is enunciated at the very bottom of the article: In any event, financial regulators shouldn't be afraid of cost-benefit analysis. If it's done well, it serves the cau ...
Destructive Centralization of Global Security
February 18, 2015
This anti-extremism summit is likely laying the groundwork for further repression of US freedoms. It is using the fear of "terrorism" to do so. The legal remedies created as a result will eventually be aimed at domestic critics of US fedgov's increasingly repre ...
Are You Ready For Total Currency War?
February 18, 2015
"Are you ready for total war?" "Sind Sie bereit für totalen Krieg?" – Joseph Goebbels. On February 18, 1943, German Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels delivered a rousing speech at the Berlin Sportpalast, asking the German people, "Sind Sie bereit für tota ...
drone
Creepy, Calculating and Controlling: All the Ways Big Brother Is Watching You
February 18, 2015
"You had to live—did live, from habit that became instinct—in the assumption that every sound you made was overheard, and, except in darkness, every movement scrutinized." – George Orwell, 1984. None of us are perfect. All of us bend the rules occasionall ...
jumping in field with balloons
Sub-Prime Redux? … Happy Days!
February 17, 2015
The ingredients are being assembled for another Greater Recession. Methodically, they are placed in the pot. And eventually the pot will be stirred ... and the result will not be pretty. Central banks are printing money as never before. The BIS guides them and ...
Yemen: A Chaotic Country Worth Watching Closely
February 17, 2015
There are no nation-states, only cultures. Yemen is a good example of this. Western forces are trying to put back together a "nation" that never worked in the first place. And the reason given is (basically) Western security. But we would argue along with Ron P ...
Is America Still on F. A. Hayek's Road to Serfdom?
February 17, 2015
A little more than seventy years ago, on March 10, 1944, there appeared in Great Britain one of the most amazing and influential political books of the twentieth century, The Road to Serfdom by Friedrich A. Hayek, which forewarned of socialist trends in Britain ...
Are Central Banks Benefiting Debtor Nations Via Monetary Strategies – or Are They Merely Fixing Prices?
February 16, 2015
Here is yet another article arguing that making money worth less increases prosperity. Black is white, up is down, etc. We truly live in an age where most of the world's received wisdom is at least questionable. And it is not hard to tell why. There are conside ...
Instead of Worrying About Funding DHS, Why Don't Republicans Consider a Long-Term Shutdown?
February 16, 2015
Republicans are worried about getting blamed for a Department of Homeland Security shutdown. The idea, as always, is that government needs to function effectively. If it doesn't then somebody is at risk of losing his job. And that's usually – according to com ...
Obama's Force Authorization is a Blank Check for War Worldwide
February 16, 2015
The president is requesting Congress to pass an authorization for the use of military force (AUMF) resolution against ISIS. Congress has not issued a similar resolution since 2002, when President Bush was given the authority to wage war against Iraq. The purpos ...
James Jaeger: Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About Hollywood Economics – and More
February 15, 2015
I see the main issue as the continued expansion of the welfare and warfare state. The national debt is now $16.8 trillion and it was about $8.5 trillion when I made FIAT EMPIRE in 2006. It looks like the bankers are winning. I thus think the only way this debt ...
Fed Under Attack Again – This Time From One of Its Own
February 13, 2015
The comments being made by Richard Fisher are probably a result of a recent Fed scandal involving the New York Fed and Goldman Sachs. Carmen Segarra worked at the Federal Reserve in New York and started secretly recording conversations in 2012 involving Goldman ...
Understand Free-Market Economics to Understand Your World
February 13, 2015
Here is Bloomberg yet again postulating that business cycles are not predictable and that – by default – central bank money printing has nothing to do with it. Of course, one of the big breakthroughs of the 20th century was, in our view, the discovery by Lu ...
Greece Offers New Bailout Plan as Latest Grexit Drama Commences
February 12, 2015
We begin to see a pattern here. As always, we are led to believe the crisis is unavoidable and the horror is about to descend. And then at the last minute, or even after the last minute, the bureaucrats somehow manage to resolve their differences. Some governme ...
A Neo-European Marshall Plan for Europe Is Not a Good Idea
February 12, 2015
This article proposes that the US ought to get involved in European affairs as it has "twice before" in the past century. When the article talks about "involvement," what is considered necessary is apparently a large sum of US cash that will allow Greece in par ...
Sex v. Gender. Understanding Political Correctness
February 12, 2015
The term "social construction" has entered the popular culture and vocabulary without being clearly defined in people's minds. It refers to far more than merely deconstructing an idea or an institution, such as the court system, and then reconstructing it diffe ...
Bashing Central Banks – Does Rand Paul Know What He's Talking About?
February 11, 2015
This Bloomberg editorial begins with an elaborate apology regarding a mis-statement that Rand Paul referred to US$57 trillion in Fed assets in a recent speech when he actually said US$57 billion. But the article doesn't back down any further regarding Rand Paul ...
Mainstream Media Hops on the Cannabis Express
February 11, 2015
Even now, many look on entrepreneurs in the cannabis space with mild derision. The industry has boomed so soon and multiplied into such a variety of opportunities that most people cannot foresee just how far or fast a cannabis venture can travel. Forbes, on the ...
Why I'm Not Breaking Up with America This Valentine's Day
February 11, 2015
Almost every week I get an email from an American expatriate living outside the country who commiserates about the deplorable state of our freedoms in the United States, expounds on his great fortune in living outside the continental U.S., and urges me to leave ...
Our House of Cards
February 11, 2015
As John Williams (shadowstats.com) has observed, the payroll jobs reports no longer make any logical or statistical sense. Ask yourself, do you believe that retailers responded to the very disappointing Christmas season by rushing out in January to hire 46,000 ...
As TPP Sails Forth, It Drags the West Into Uncharted Waters
February 10, 2015
There are two free trade pacts being negotiated currently, one in the "Pacific" and the other in the "Atlantic." The Pacific one seems to get most of the attention and there is good news for those who want the treaty cancelled or radically reconfigured. The goo ...
Internet Raises 'Organic'?
February 10, 2015
This is partially one of those "backlash" editorials, designed to take a countervailing position in order to stimulate our sense of inquiry. That's what we read editorials for, editors like to believe. In a sense, it harkens back to 20th century memes having to ...
The Morality of Capitalism: Liberty, Honesty and Humility
February 10, 2015
In American culture there is one persistent villain portrayed as the enemy of humanity, the perpetrator of deception, and the agent for social corruption and human harm: the businessman. Whether in news commentaries or on the movie screen, the businessman is pr ...
Central Bank Easing Expands – And It's No Coincidence
February 09, 2015
We've been writing about this race to the bottom for months now. From our point of view, it seems like a kind of directed history. First, central bankers announce the specter of deflation and then they gradually take steps to combat it. They also announce that ...
Dragnet Closing in on US Citizens and Their Assets
February 09, 2015
This article from Martin Armstrong is a timely reminder that cross-border protections are getting stronger not weaker. We've estimated in the past that within two years time it will be significantly more difficult to get funds in and out of the US. Armstrong ha ...
Vaccine Controversy Shows Why We Need Markets, Not Mandates
February 09, 2015
If I were still a practicing ob-gyn and one of my patients said she was not going to vaccinate her child, I might try to persuade her to change her mind. But, if I were unsuccessful, I would respect her decision. I certainly would not lobby the government to pa ...
John Knapp: A Pioneer in Medicinal Cannabis Shares Valuable Insights in a Profitable and Fast-Growing Field
February 08, 2015
I think we just need a little more time for things to gain momentum on the federal level. The National Cannabis Industry Association (NCIA) and the Marijuana Industry Group (MIG) both bring an incredible amount of credibility and organization to this effort. Wi ...
Is Jeb Bush a GOP Leader, or Symptom of a Larger Problem of the US Political System?
February 07, 2015
A recent Reuters editorial asks, "Is Jeb Bush just another 'big government' liberal?" The article then goes on to discuss the differences between the "liberal" and GOP conservatives. This is an interesting analysis but I will try to show that it leaves out a th ...
Despite Controlling Factors, Greek Negotiations Remain Fraught
February 06, 2015
Is this a dance between the EU and Greece, designed to yield tension, headlines and ultimately resolution? Or is it a legitimate unraveling of the EU's program? Once again, the world waits and watches while powerful government officials bargain over national an ...
Bloomberg: Europe Will Continue to Totter
February 06, 2015
In the other article in this issue, we've analyzed the dialectic now taking hold between Greece and the EU. We pointed out that the EU may be trying to control negotiations as best it can but that these negotiations are disruptive nonetheless and presumably the ...
S&P Lawsuit Settlement Doesn't Address Real Issue of Asset Inflation
February 05, 2015
The suit is settled and presumably it's back to business as normal for S&P. The ratings agency stood accused of providing too-rosy ratings in order to gain clients. Of course, S&P was not the only agency to provide ratings that looked overly optimistic after th ...
Colorado's Windfall Could Help Speed Cannabis Legalization
February 05, 2015
Not long ago, cannabis was generally illegal and you could go to jail for a long time by smoking it. But now with legalization and decriminalization taking place in the US and elsewhere, cannabis is being touted as a government money spinner. In the case of Col ...
Military Metaphysics: A Military Definition of Reality
February 05, 2015
The political sociologist C. Wright Mills (1916-1962) coined a new term, The Power Elite, through the title of his popular 1956 book. The term described the relationships of power between people who occupied leadership positions in three key segments of society ...
Blame Corporations for Income Inequality?
February 04, 2015
The US economy is making a comeback but not for individuals. This article in Al Jazeera, a quasi-mainstream publication, provides us with these insights. The article is written by David Cay Johnston, an award-winning investigative reporter who recently produced ...
Greece – Back From the Brink?
February 04, 2015
We recently pointed out in an article – "Grexit: The Footsteps Grow Louder ... Could the EU Blow Apart?" – that Germans might be very unhappy with a rescheduling of Greek debt. But that looks like what is happening. The proximate mechanism is a proposal by ...
How Reality TV Is Teaching Us to Accept the American Police State
February 04, 2015
Americans love their reality TV shows – the drama, the insults, the bullying, the callousness, the damaged relationships delivered through the lens of a surveillance camera – and there's no shortage of such dehumanizing spectacles to be found on or off scre ...
When It Comes to the Bull Market, Keep Your Eye on the Money Printing, Not the Regulation
February 03, 2015
This article is in line with what we've forecast in the past regarding regulation and asset expansions. When markets crash, it is easy to create regulations to "address" the perceived problem. In fact, legislators often don't know or understand the problem, but ...
Normalization of a Meme: How Rand and Jeb Create a Dialectic Necessary for Cannabis's Legalization
February 03, 2015
Despite both a US and global movement toward legalizing cannabis, or at least decriminalizing medical cannabis, there hasn't been a lot of personalized political conversation. Yet it is often such anecdotal conversations that help create a dialectic to begin wi ...
The Ghosts of Yalta Still Haunt the World
February 03, 2015
Seventy years ago, during the week of February 4-11, 1945, the most momentous conference of the Second World War was held at Yalta in the Crimea between Franklin D. Roosevelt, Winston Churchill and Joseph Stalin. Their decisions have affected much of the world ...
Grexit: The Footsteps Grow Louder … Could the EU Blow Apart?
February 02, 2015
There are no easy answers here now that the Greek Syriza government has been elected and made it clear (at least so far) that it will not continue down the road that Greece is supposedly – lawfully – bound to travel. A previous administration signed on to a ...
McCain Disparages Anti-War Protestors, Pushback Is Significant
February 02, 2015
The recent verbal confrontation between McCain and members (in particular) of the activist group Code Pink illustrates how the Internet works. We are reminded again why isolation and ridicule of target groups is often counter-productive in the 21st century. McC ...
The Failed 'Yemen Model'
February 02, 2015
Last September President Obama cited his drone program in Yemen as a successful model of US anti-terrorism strategy. He said that he would employ the Yemen model in his effort to "degrade and ultimately destroy" ISIS in Iraq and Syria. But just a week ago, the ...
Jay Taylor: Super Deflationary Depression May Be Looming
February 01, 2015
The biggest issue facing the Western world today is "counterfeit money." Central bankers are doing exactly what mafia dons are thrown in jail for doing, namely creating counterfeit money. They create money out of nothing, which then is multiplied many times ove ...
Central Bankers, Please Do Not Unite on a Neo-Plaza Accord
January 31, 2015
We read on Bloomberg that central bankers ought to get together to create a new Plaza Accord, similar to the one that formally devalued the US dollar back in the mid-1980s relative to a number of countries, most notably Japan. Of course, central bank activities ...
The Economist's Departure Is Bloomberg's Gain?
January 30, 2015
One way to look at this move is to see it as a benefit for both publications. That's because there is not a lot of difference between Bloomberg and The Economist when it comes to editorial direction. Bloomberg is in a sense relentlessly authoritarian and so is ...
Indian Tribes Advance Into Cannabis Cultivation, Though Gaming Model May Not Apply
January 30, 2015
Indian tribes are taking swift steps to involve themselves in cannabis cultivation and marketing. This takes place following regulatory and business advances that have made the Native American entrée increasingly feasible. The Daily Bell previously reported on ...
The Libertarian Principle of Secession
January 30, 2015
For a century and a half, the idea of secession has been systematically demonized among the American public. The government schools spin fairy tales about the "indivisible Union" and the wise statesmen who fought to preserve it. Decentralization is portrayed as ...
'Sons of Liberty': A Review
January 30, 2015
The History channel's new miniseries, "Sons of Liberty," will anger the purists and the prudes. But it will delight the swashbuckler in the rest of us. It is a big, bodacious screening with superb production values that covers the lead-up years to the American ...
Misdirection and Misinformation Plague EU Analyses – From the Top Down
January 29, 2015
Here is a good example of how top financial execs try to make sure "no crisis goes to waste." In the recent past, especially, we've been explaining how the EU's foundering – along with the euro – was actually part of a larger, hush-hush strategic plan. Carn ...
Is It Peak Food Yet? Yale Seems to Predict Worldwide Starvation
January 29, 2015
So now there is peak food. From the standpoint of farming and food production, peak food is probably good news. Prices will go up; demand will rise. It will surely become a self-fulfilling prophecy. But is it true? We tend to think at a fundamental level peak f ...
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