STAFF NEWS & ANALYSIS
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March 15, 2013
We wrote a number of articles about the threat of social unrest in China using the logic of "three strikes." The first strike was the great famine under Mao; the second famine was Tiananmen Square; the third strike would be an unwinding of the modern Chinese ec ...
March 15, 2013
Now gold is being sucked directly into the Libor scandal. Of course, we are on record as pointing out that it can hardly be much of a scandal when central banks set the price and volume of money every day. But nonetheless, the mainstream press has been buzzing ...
March 14, 2013
From the above excerpt we can see that Credit Suisse has changed its mind about equities. A month ago ... no way. And now ... way to go! The recommendation comes on the heels of reports that various billionaire holders of equity are selling out of the equity ma ...
March 14, 2013
It's all over the news today. There are strong indications that the "God Particle" – the Higgs Boson – has been discovered. Scientists have been going over the data developed by the Large Hadron Collider last year and now are confident that the particle may ...
March 14, 2013
This is a shocker. In another article in this issue we pointed out that bigness did not guarantee creativity and usually retarded it, from what we can tell. But there is no doubt that given the trillions – literally – tossed at the scientific community, now ...
March 14, 2013
Free-Market Analysis: We've written about electric cars quite a bit because it is such an obvious elite meme. There is no use for electric cars that we can see, no clamor for them. But nonetheless they have been rolled out in endless waves accompanied by great ...
March 14, 2013
Bannister on Theories: "... the psychologist cannot present a picture of man which patently contradicts his behavior in presenting that picture." From Borger & Cioffi/Bannister, eds., Explanation in the Behavioural Sciences (Cambridge UP, 1970), p. 417. Aristot ...
March 14, 2013
Free-Market Analysis: Why do US consumers need protection from the private sector? Shouldn't competition winnow out the bad guys and reward the good? And if the CFPB is a bad idea – and from a free-market standpoint it certainly is – then why don't federal ...
March 14, 2013
This week's Solari Story from Catherine Austin Fitts is titled "Federal Finances and Law." Here's a bit of the transcript: "The federal finances are subject to constitutional requirements about how our money's managed. So the Constitution lays out a framework a ...
March 13, 2013
This editorial over at Reuters explains to us that leadership involves fixing the price and value of money. Also that Europe's political leaders must show "implacable rigor" (our term) in proving they have the "will" to salvage both the EU and the euro. When ar ...
March 13, 2013
Top Federal Reserve "big brain" Richard Fisher is back with his prescription for fixing what has gone wrong with the US's financial economy. He has a three-part solution. First, the federal government ought to provide deposit insurance and access to the Fed's d ...
March 13, 2013
The European Union is trying to make it easier for people to fly. But as we can see from another article in this issue, the EU and supporters use the implacable authority of government and the threat of force and monetary manipulation to support an ongoing expa ...
March 13, 2013
Another article in this issue analyses a "bill of rights" issued by the European Union to try to make air travel more tolerable. But the same problems that afflict air travel also bedevil Britain's one-size-fits-all National Health System. Government-run health ...
March 12, 2013
Free-Market Analysis: Grillo's stunning ascent in Italy's political firmament is both insular and astonishing. There is something about it that is manipulated as well as genuine. Thanks to various DB feedbackers for pointing this out. We've written about it alr ...
March 12, 2013
The Southern PIGS have a third way when it comes to the horrible austerity-drama that is playing out in Europe. Call it the "collapse gambit." First, some background. The disaster in Southern Europe was manmade and based on government profligacy and an EU monop ...
March 12, 2013
One of our main points throughout the life of this Website has been that the Internet itself is increasingly creating fungible coalitions of those who believe in freedom and free markets on both sides of the political spectrum. This seemed to us to be especiall ...
March 12, 2013
So there will be no more austerity? To continue with the horrible metaphors surrounding the Greek situation, now that the patient is dead there will be no further attempts to cure him. The Greek situation is beyond wretched. Top earners are being pursued by hel ...
March 12, 2013
This yelp from Klarman (above) is worth noting because the atmosphere of intimidation and fear surround the Federal Reserve is palpable and precludes obvious criticisms. We've often compared what is going to the famous fable, The Emperor's Clothes. In this tale ...
March 12, 2013
According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the US economy created 236,000 new jobs in February. If you believe that, I have a bridge in Brooklyn that I'll let you have at a good price. Where are these alleged jobs? The BLS says 48,000 were created in construc ...
March 11, 2013
The US as a nation owes more money than it can possibly pay back and has had its credit downgraded, unemployment is around 20 percent (or more), though the official figures don't reveal that, inflation is probably close to 10 percent or more and there is probab ...
March 11, 2013
How did Britain arrive at this place? A leading business group, the British Chamber of Commerce (BCC), calls on the government to spur the building trades by funding 50,000 houses. This provides us with two examples of economic illiteracy. First is the idea tha ...
March 11, 2013
We've written a number of articles on Africa now, explaining the way "investing" works on a macro level – and why Africa is the next "chosen one." This article is just one more example of why we're reporting on it. Just as we were among the very first to dete ...
March 11, 2013
Professor Lynn Hunt's recently published book on rights, titled Inventing Human Rights, is filled with a great deal of very useful, important information about the emergence of the idea of basic human, individual rights but it also perpetuates, perhaps entirely ...
March 11, 2013
Last week the US Senate took a break from debating the phony cuts known as "sequestration," for Senator Rand Paul to hold a 13-hour filibuster to force the Obama administration to state whether it believes the President has the right to kill American citizens w ...
March 11, 2013
The Dow is still rising. It rose another 125 points yesterday [Marh 5] ... hitting a new record high. Gold is dawdling. We're still thinking about how so many smart people came to believe things that aren't true. Krugman, Stiglitz, Friedman, Bernanke — all se ...
March 10, 2013
The editors of The Daily Bell are pleased to present another interview with well-known libertarian philosopher Tibor R. Machan. Here's a brief snippet. Daily Bell: Our theme for this interview is the progress of freedom in the Internet era – within the contex ...
March 09, 2013
An article in the UK Guardian, "Why Bob Geldof is wrong about Africa," caught my attention because – unusually – it argued that the private sector was a good deal more effective at helping people and economies than occasional large doses of publicly adminis ...
March 08, 2013
This was predictable. Keynesian monetary stimulation doesn't work. The US has a bifurcated economic system now, which is really the European royalist system. This would seem to be the result of deliberate economic policies that have virtually split the US into ...
March 08, 2013
As we mentioned in another article, today, the US is increasingly operating as a two-track society and simply observing the price of the Dow Jones Industrial Average does little to enlighten us about the real health of the US economy. While NPR is not usually a ...
March 08, 2013
Just yesterday we pointed out that the Italian elections further deepened the grave that Southern Europe is preparing for the EU and for the euro. But a feedbacker pointed out that the winner in Italy's recent election, Beppe Grillo, was a disciple of the socia ...
March 08, 2013
"Financial markets are not yet pricing in US over-indebtedness. If they did, the world would be heading towards a 'blood-red abyss'." ~ Professor Laurence J. Kotlikoff Over the past few months, the economies of industrial nations have continued to shrink. The e ...
March 07, 2013
Italians went to the polls and rejected the EU's faux austerity program but former premier Mario Monti doesn't accept the new course and has proposed new elections instead. This has happened before. When Ireland voted against the wishes of the Eurocrats, Irelan ...
March 07, 2013
This is certainly a well-written and incisive analysis but we find it difficult to believe in this day and age that someone can argue that printing paper money is not of itself inflationary and that it will not lead to price inflation. The Austrian – free-mar ...
March 07, 2013
Wow, Bill Gates writes a book review on his site, TheGatesNotes, and we get a glimpse of how the great man thinks about major issues of our time. Gates hits a lot of the right notes in his review, from our perspective. Of course, we haven't read the book so we ...
March 07, 2013
For years I subscribed to The New York Times online. Then I took the Sunday Times only for a couple of years but they managed to annoy me nearly as much as the daily edition. (I still have the online version, mainly so that I can check in on the latest balderda ...
March 07, 2013
"'Fat, Sick and Nearly Dead' ... in essence shows how 80 percent of America can solve most of their health care problems at very low cost because the thing that is driving health care expenses up is you have a highly controlled, highly governmentalized system â ...
March 06, 2013
Mark Carney is set to be the next Governor of the Bank of England, so his words are worth listening to. In a message to university students at Western University (see above) Carney revealed the reason for the regulatory push that is going on in the EU and North ...
March 06, 2013
This New Yorker article offers us tribute to monetary policy. But certainly there must be a question about manipulating stock averages up using increased money flows. The article ends by challenging free-market types to "acknowledge the success" of politics and ...
March 06, 2013
We've written about this emerging trend before but it is such a startling one and contains such great import that it is worth noting again, and perhaps on a regular basis. This Economist article from our point of view is no accident. It conforms to other simila ...
March 06, 2013
This is a strange article because it acknowledges what anyone who has covered business cycles for a length of time knows well – that the demise of such cycles, while regularly predicted is never accurate. Bill Clinton predicted an end to destructive business ...
March 06, 2013
In his Congressional testimony last week in Washington, Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke took time to downplay the significance of the few dissenting voices on the Fed's Open Market Committee (FOMC). Those statements, combined with an even more dovish statement by Fed ...
March 05, 2013
The move toward auditing gold holdings is getting more pronounced as we can see from this demand by Mexico in the above article excerpt. German officials have asked the US government for gold repatriation and so has Venezuela. Now it's Mexico's turn to start th ...
March 05, 2013
Predictions of a bond bubble popping are generally accepted now and not so surprising as they were even a year ago. But this Reuters editorial on the Great Rotation out of bonds makes some good points. No matter what happens with the bond markets – especially ...
March 05, 2013
At this point in the business cycle it's pretty amazing that those running the EU believe that controlling bank bonuses by regulatory fiat is going to do anything to ameliorate the EU's larger problems. The issue, of course, is not out-of-control banks or banke ...
March 05, 2013
Not so fast. It certainly begins to look like Chavez is not going to recover from his long struggle with cancer and a surface analysis of South America without Chavez might conclude that the region will be less confrontational. But this may not be the case. Cha ...
March 05, 2013
Officially, since June 2009 the US economy has been undergoing an economic recovery from the December 2007 recession. But where is this recovery? I cannot find it, and neither can millions of unemployed Americans. The recovery exists only in the official measur ...
March 05, 2013
Testifying before the US Senate this past Tuesday, Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke made an extraordinary claim about its bloated balance sheet: "We could exit without ever selling by letting it run off." What Bernanke means here is that the Fed could simply hold its ...
March 04, 2013
Black Swan. Being Austrian, we never believed in it to begin with. There are business cycles, triggered by excessive money printing – and these cycles predictably trigger black swan events. Which means, really, there are no black swans. The black swan was a k ...
March 04, 2013
The New York Times, like other mainstream publications, is struggling with reader feedback. More and more mainstream media limits feedback to articles, in our view – and this is partially because the feedback seems to be getting more and more vehement ... and ...
March 04, 2013
Wall Street – an intermediating industry – has been cast lately as the cynosure of evil, the center of maleficence. Whatever is wrong with the world springs from Wall Street – or so some think, especially the Occupy Wall Street crowd. But now it appears t ...
