STAFF NEWS & ANALYSIS
Showing 4001 - 2 of 2
September 15, 2014
This article makes the point that the problem with the European economy is a lack of competitiveness, not a lack of money. This is an important, even fundamental point. We've written a number of articles recently explaining why the European Central Bank's new m ...
September 15, 2014
This was predictable. Buffett is finally making a move. What's a little puzzling is why he waited so long. But it had to come. We've already predicted that the industry is going to see corporate participation and sooner than later. Industrial giants are all goi ...
September 15, 2014
On November 30th, voters in Switzerland will head to the polls to vote in a referendum on gold. On the ballot is a measure to prohibit the Swiss National Bank (SNB) from further gold sales, to repatriate Swiss-owned gold to Switzerland, and to mandate that gold ...
September 14, 2014
Speaking for the US, it will be too late when the next real or contrived major terrorist attack on the US takes place. A couple of days after this happens, the United States and your ability to leave, or have funds wired into or outside the country unless you a ...
September 13, 2014
We've been covering the growth of asset bubbles throughout 2014 and now, as we approach the troublesome month of October, it's a good time to reassess. The mainstream media is filled with predictions of a "market crash" and I figure this means some sort of sign ...
September 12, 2014
Ambrose Evans-Pritchard provides us with a trenchant analysis of what's taking place in Europe, and then makes a wrong turn toward the end of the article. He does that a lot these days. Nonetheless, it's an interesting report, explaining that Europe is increasi ...
September 12, 2014
According to this article, there may be a crash in the fall, but investors should protect themselves, stay in the market and treat a crash as a buying opportunity. The market is having a long-term bull run, according to this article, and investors should be exp ...
September 11, 2014
This is a funny editorial in Bloomberg because its author is convinced that mainstream dominant social themes constitute the truth of this world. The article worries that a withdrawal of belief in elite memes indicates that Dark Ages are creeping over the West ...
September 11, 2014
This article is provided to us by Norman Tebbit, a well-known "conservative commentator" and former Thatcher cabinet minister. His point is that the panicky offer by David Cameron to give more power directly to the Scottish assembly if the Scots vote against in ...
September 11, 2014
I finally remembered advice I received from Ayn Rand's former lieutenant, Nathaniel Branden, and the memory of it led me down an odd path of thought. First, the advice. It came many years ago as a result of my openly admiring how well Branden handled himself du ...
September 11, 2014
The tragedy of September 11, 2001, goes far beyond the deaths of those who died in the towers and the deaths of firefighters and first responders who succumbed to illnesses caused by inhalation of toxic dust. For thirteen years a new generation of Americans has ...
September 10, 2014
This Economist article is all about why price inflation is necessary to help Europe's bleeding economies achieve "fiscal consolidation." Fiscal consolidation is a polite descriptive term for raising taxes and cutting government spending. Inflation helps this pr ...
September 10, 2014
Perhaps alone in the blogosphere, as regular readers know, The Daily Bell identified the "meme" of cannabis legalization almost immediately. High Alert was then able to utilize this knowledge to identify shareholder opportunities – some of which are ongoing. ...
September 09, 2014
Imagine taking bits of colored paper, making more of them and then waiting for jobs to appear. One has little to do with the other, but according to a steady stream of articles in Bloomberg and the rest of the mainstream media, such an act leads to an inevitabl ...
September 09, 2014
Last year, India's government made it harder and more expensive to import gold and this article in the Financial Times trumpets the success the government has had in its war on gold. Because of India's insatiable demand for gold, the country's current account b ...
September 09, 2014
America! For more than two hundred years the word has represented hope, opportunity, a second chance and freedom. In America the accident of a man's birth did not serve as an inescapable weight that dictated a person's fate or that of his family. The individual ...
September 08, 2014
We've written regularly about the difficulties with the EU for years and what's astonishing is that almost all of our predictions about its dysfunctional nature – and predictable results – have been realized, and yet the EU staggers on. There were even, as ...
September 08, 2014
It is really astonishing to contemplate how far we have come in the past few years since decriminalization of cannabis exploded onto the world scene. And since the legalization of cannabis in Uruguay, conversations and actions concerning the "mainstreaming" of ...
September 08, 2014
Forty years ago many Americans celebrated the demise of the imperial presidency with the resignation of Richard Nixon. Today it is clear they celebrated too soon. Nixon's view of presidential powers, summed up in his infamous statement that, "when the president ...
September 07, 2014
So they tried to present me in a sinister light by taking a lot of things out of context and they actually had to piece that segment together kind of like Frankenstein made his monster, because they actually would show them asking questions and then the answers ...
September 06, 2014
A recent, little noticed article discussing Russia's signing of US FATCA legislation contained a surprising confessionary note – and an important one. The main news was simple enough, of course. Vladimir Putin has signed Russian legislation mandating potentia ...
September 05, 2014
The "fall" is aptly named when it comes to Wall Street's prospects over the next three months. These three months, and especially October, have been most cruel to market performances, especially during occurrences of asset bubbles. Such bubbles tend to get pric ...
September 05, 2014
In the other article in today's issue, we took a look at China's increasingly wretched economic performance in terms of its upcoming stock market impact. You'll see that our view takes into account China's huge size, which seems to preclude a rapid public unrav ...
September 05, 2014
Not since the 16th century, when the tomato was widely believed to be poisonous, has any plant been draped in as much misinformation as cannabis. After battling the anti-cannabis propaganda for the last decade, I'm getting a little weary of hearing it echoed ag ...
September 05, 2014
The truth about the American economy. The labor force participation rate has declined from 66.5% in 2007 prior to the last downturn to 62.7% today. This decline in the participation rate is difficult to reconcile with the alleged economic recovery that began in ...
September 04, 2014
We've long written about plans at the highest levels of the US government to effectively merge the US and Mexico and then Canada as well into what's been called a North American Union (NAU). Of course, this sounds paranoid and "conspiratorial." But take a look ...
September 04, 2014
This article appeared on September 1, and perhaps the editorial staff of the New York Post intended to use the paper's "bully pulpit" to remind federal legislators that they had three more months to accomplish something significant. There is however, one encour ...
September 04, 2014
A common reason people break with orthodox objectivism is because they embrace anarchism rather than limited government. Ayn Rand was a well known advocate of a night-watchman government that was limited to protecting the person and property of those within its ...
September 03, 2014
The Club of Rome is a globalist think tank that expressed elite scarcity memes back in the 1970s. Its famous book, Limits to Growth, provoked fear of a "population explosion" and government intervention to define limits and enforce them. The scaremongering of t ...
September 03, 2014
Sometimes Federal Reserve white papers attract attention and this one does because of the term "hoarding money." This is a startling phrase and – who knows – perhaps it marks the beginning of a new meme. Certainly the word "hoarding" is a popular one with g ...
September 03, 2014
It has puzzled me for some time why campaign contribution is considered a First Amendment constitutional issue. If I write out a check to some candidate, I am not talking, writing an essay, carrying some poster in a parade or anything that could be construed as ...
September 02, 2014
What's going on in China and Hong Kong is ironic because it seems to mimic much that has held the West back in modern times. In fact, much that China suffers from at its current level of development corresponds to a similar evolution in the West. Bloomberg reso ...
September 02, 2014
Reuters is astonished that people aren't so worried about global warming as they used to be. The editorial excerpted above spends a lot of time trying to figure out why this is so. Of course, maybe people are less worried because they have decided the threat ha ...
September 02, 2014
It is an old adage that there are lies, damn lies and then there are statistics. Nowhere is this truer than in the government's monthly Consumer Price Index (CPI) that tracks the prices for a selected "basket" of goods to determine changes in people's cost of l ...
September 01, 2014
Bloomberg offers two editorials on Europe that tell us economic growth is not going well. The one above speaks to the issue of Mario Draghi's lack of courage in terms of implementing a program of aggressive money printing. The other one, which we excerpt below, ...
September 01, 2014
This article can be seen two ways. One, the US tax regime that it is trying to install in Switzerland is being resisted, at least a little. On two, the news can be seen as a message that once its tax regime is in place, US officials are prepared to be flexible, ...
September 01, 2014
Last week President Obama admitted that his administration has not worked out a strategy on how to deal with the emergence of the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS) as a dominant force in the Middle East. However, as ISIS continues its march through Syria a ...
September 01, 2014
Earlier this month the New York Times wondered aloud if the "libertarian moment" had arrived. A good question, to be sure. To answer it, though, Times reporter Robert Draper sought out not quite the top libertarian thinkers in the world, but instead those peopl ...
August 31, 2014
When I first started to look at marijuana I went into the library, and this was in 1967, because many of my friends in Cambridge were using it and I would say to them, "You mustn't do that. That's harmful. You really shouldn't smoke that." I was an arrogant you ...
August 30, 2014
Dr. Henry Kissinger has written an article entitled, "Henry Kissinger on the Assembly of a New World Order" posted at The Wall Street Journal. It's an important article written by an important man. Dr. Kissinger, the Journal tells us, "served as national securi ...
August 29, 2014
The Economist magazine has decided a major problem with the US economy is that its largest multinational corporations and banks are being held for ransom by avaricious lawyers. The magazine in this issue reports that "Bank of America, JPMorgan Chase, Citigroup, ...
August 29, 2014
Even though half of Europe seems to be standing in breadlines, Eurocrats have other concerns. They keep pounding out unnecessary laws. The amount of regulation produced by Brussels is staggering but now the absurdity is ascending into the stratosphere as the EU ...
August 28, 2014
Bloomberg's Noah Smith is back with an editorial explaining that even though economics isn't a science, it's still a swell "culture." What's funny about this article is that Smith's admission as to what economics really is corresponds entirely to the points tha ...
August 28, 2014
How quickly times change. Yesterday, marijuana was a criminal offense virtually the world over. Today, research is finding that those who ingest it lessen their dependence on prescription painkillers and thus, apparently, are not so subject to their potential d ...
August 28, 2014
The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA or Obamacare) became law in early 2010. Arguably, it is the single greatest assault on the right of individuals to control their own bodies that America has seen in decades. Few matters are more intimate tha ...
August 28, 2014
Every public institution in the United States and most private ones are corrupt. To tell this story would be a multi-book task. Lawrence Stratton and I have written one small volume of the story. Our book, The Tyranny of Good Intentions, now with two editions a ...
August 27, 2014
Ellen Brown is back with another of her brilliant yet flawed analyses of the modern financial scene. Her idea, which she admits is not entirely original, is that the international debt paradigm is starting to change dramatically, to the further detriment of the ...
August 27, 2014
The high-profile website ZeroHedge caused a stir yesterday by presenting an article (see above) that appeared in the CFR's Foreign Affairs magazine. The article called for the Federal Reserve to hand out money directly to consumers. Wow. The article was of inte ...
August 26, 2014
What does the future hold? More and more money stimulation it would seem. China – the BRICS – and the US are printing endless gouts of money, and now it appears as if the European Union is headed in the same direction. In fact, the EU cannot simply print, a ...
August 26, 2014
Berlin is leading the way for neo-Luddites, confronting both Internet-based taxi services and lodging facilities. Most of the sectors where the Internet is having the most dramatic effect are heavily regulated and thus inefficient and lacking in consumer choice ...
