STAFF NEWS & ANALYSIS
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June 24, 2013
Ellen Brown has written another statist hagiography called The Public Bank Solution. As a libertarian-oriented website promoting free-market economic approaches, we obviously disagree with her premise. We don't mind disagreeing with her because she is a nice pe ...
June 24, 2013
We've written several articles explaining we are suspicious of the bitcoin phenomenon. Given the news of the past few weeks, including this cease and desist order referred to above, we thought we would revisit bitcoin. As proponents of competitive currencies al ...
June 24, 2013
So now that the leaders of regulatory democracies in a concerted fashion have built up the surveillance society over decades, it is up to voters to turn back the proverbial tide in a couple of weeks. This is what Der Spiegel indignantly demands. Sure, the other ...
June 24, 2013
A broken woman, Paula Deen ducked a national US television appearance and instead recently released several YouTube videos abjectly apologizing for things that had been said years ago. As a result, her supporters are organizing a boycott of the Food Network. Se ...
June 24, 2013
Last week the Taliban opened an office in Doha, Qatar with the US government's blessing. They raised the Taliban flag at the opening ceremony and referred to Afghanistan as the "Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan" - the name they used when they were in charge befor ...
June 24, 2013
On June 19, 2013, US President Obama, hoping to raise himself above the developing National Security Agency (NSA) spy scandals, sought to associate himself with two iconic speeches made at the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin. Fifty years ago, President John F. Kenne ...
June 23, 2013
The Daily Bell is pleased to present this exclusive interview with Chris Becker. Introduction: Chris Becker is an economic strategist at ETM Analytics, an economic and investment consultancy based in Johannesburg, South Africa. He currently heads up ETM's Afric ...
June 22, 2013
Big news, from my point of view. Late this week, conservative columnist George F. Will wrote an editorial that compiled a list of what we call dominant social themes, even though he didn't explain them as such. The list was required to buttress accusations he w ...
June 22, 2013
Big Pharma is big business, some of the biggest business around – and increasingly on the Internet and even in the mainstream its methods of operations are being questioned. One way companies turn a profit while avoiding the scrutiny of Western media is to ta ...
June 22, 2013
As usual the Federal Reserve media reaction machine has fallen for a poorly executed head fake. It has been fooled by this move many times in the past and for its efforts it has tackled nothing but air. Yet right on cue, it took the bait once more. Somehow the ...
June 21, 2013
For years, we've pointed out that central bankers can print money but they don't know what to do when it comes to removing money from the economy. Even assuming that most Federal Reserve notes (dollars) are still trapped in bank (Fed) coffers, there is obviousl ...
June 21, 2013
This Reuters opinion piece makes a lot of good points. But we don't agree with the ending. Don't skip ahead, though. We'll take you through it logically. To begin with, a point made throughout is that Ben Bernanke's successor as head of the Federal Reserve is g ...
June 21, 2013
First of all, it is really a sad state of affairs that journalists gather to ask the Great Man his opinion on anything related to the economy. As we have learned from free-market Austrian economics – and seen with our own eyes – the kinds of price-fixing th ...
June 21, 2013
Apparently, overnight, Chinese leaders relaxed their "rigor." Funny how that works. Eurocrats have relaxed their rigor when it comes to "austerity," as well. Men of "iron will" are suddenly not so tough in the face of real world consequences. And so it is with ...
June 21, 2013
In our quest to analyze the mainstream media's dominant social themes, we sometimes discover ones that surprise us. This is such a time. This Reuters article makes the case that one need not determine whether what is going on in the Western world regarding snoo ...
June 21, 2013
The Tea Party rally mentioned above was gathered to hear congressmen that at least to some degree have backed DC's security state. They are obviously for freedom ... but just not too much of it. Nonetheless, what the Gateway Pundit is observing is correct: In a ...
June 21, 2013
This week's Solari Story from Catherine Austin Fitts is titled "The $400,000,000 Story, Part I." Here's a bit of the transcript: I had just started as Assistant Secretary of Housing and one of my deputies came up to me, grabbed me by the shoulder and he said, " ...
June 20, 2013
For years, we've tried to explain that monetary policy is what influences markets the most. This is not an idle speculation by any means. If people internalize the realities of modern economics, then they will be better able to protect their own investments and ...
June 20, 2013
This article tends to confirm our thinking that the top globalists are most worried about the ongoing Great Recession and are willing to do almost anything to strike a balance between chaos and prosperity. As we've pointed out in other articles, there seems to ...
June 20, 2013
Marco Rubio was seen by some as an up-and-coming presidential contender. But presumably the cost of maintaining his position within the GOP's upper reaches itself is being a point man for this immigration bill. The bill weighs in at 24 pounds, we're told, and t ...
June 20, 2013
We are led to believe that world leaders are hardly flesh and blood. They arrive at the pinnacle of success via terrific intellectual vigor and by almost supernatural cleverness. In fact, as this letter reveals, the topmost leaders in the world are enmeshed in ...
June 20, 2013
Maybe people aren't paying attention, but the news about US institutions is abysmal. Congressional approval is near the single digits and even President Barack Obama is not receiving the adulation of years past. In Germany some 300,000 once turned out to hear h ...
June 20, 2013
It is fashionable to pooh-pooh the idea of directed history. But how does one explain the convergence of large democracies and their increasing affection for authoritarian invasions of privacy and freedom? Now apparently India is embarking on the same pathway o ...
June 19, 2013
We can hardly keep track of how many times the alternative 'Net media, including ourselves, have been proven correct in the past few months. The war in Afghanistan is an admitted failure; the world is swimming in shale oil; central banking's credibility shatter ...
June 19, 2013
US prosecutors are upset that Standard & Poor's apparently was "over-optimistic" about certain mortgage-backed securities in order to "grow its ratings share" and generate increased fees. Supposedly, S&P and other ratings agencies should have been firm about ma ...
June 19, 2013
It is almost impossible to defend the US federal government these days. Mired in something like 50 wars, endless corruption, attacking certain ideologies with destructive taxation and spying on whole populations of citizens, even the Daily Beast has apparently ...
June 19, 2013
Just the other day, we wrote about how when a culture loses its intellectual "buy in," that culture begins to lose cohesion. The long slide begins. A feedbacker was kind enough to send us some quotes from legendary free-market economist Ludwig von Mises. He wro ...
June 19, 2013
Many years back I was a candidate for a Congressional Fellowship that was administered by a group of prominent academic philosophers. I had made it into the final list of three and flew East to be interviewed, which would decide the matter of who gets the posit ...
June 18, 2013
Another quietly adulatory article. One would not think, given the continued coverage of Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke and other powerful central bankers, that the prestige of the entire institution has come under considerable attack in the past decade a ...
June 18, 2013
The final act of this phony war has commenced, and it is no more sincere than any other part of it. The Taliban "terrorists" have not been defeated and presumably there is no need for them to negotiate in good faith. Taliban leaders – both Afghan and Pakistan ...
June 18, 2013
British Prime Minister David Cameron is under attack on all fronts. The British economy is sprawled on the world stage like road-kill, British unemployment remains agonizingly high and the furor over Britain's continued presence in the European Union is causing ...
June 18, 2013
This Economist blog article starts out in a promising way by analyzing the reality surrounding Germany's power industry: State policies are contradictory and not working. In fact, the Energiewende was destined not to work because Germany's energy policy, like E ...
June 18, 2013
In the 21st century the two hundred year-old propaganda that the American people control their government has been completely shattered. Both the Bush and Obama regimes have made it unmistakenly clear that the American people don't even influence, much less con ...
June 17, 2013
The mainstream press was in full cry over Edward Snowden late last week, but there was big news regarding Iceland and the EU. Iceland's new government is no more apt to speed an entry into the EU than previous administrations. Representatives reaffirmed a decis ...
June 17, 2013
Actually, the IMF has been getting it resolutely wrong for decades. But we are supposed to accept its wisdom because it is large and the governments of countries around the world contribute to it. For us, that mostly shows the power of the Anglo-American allian ...
June 17, 2013
We expect the US to go to war fairly directly with Syria any time now. The only real suspense is how US, British and NATO leaders will justify it. All this palaver and breast-beating is just for show. The West, under its critical mass of generals, politicians a ...
June 17, 2013
At the end of this article, we'll reveal where the "malpractice" mentioned in this headline lies. But first, at the risk of repeating ourselves, let us remind readers, "We told you so." For years we've been writing that the Chinese Miracle is nothing more than ...
June 17, 2013
In the previous article, we pointed out that Fitch just discovered what Daily Bell readers have known for years, that the Chinese Miracle isn't exactly what it seems to be. What created the "miracle" and continues to support it is an almost-impossible-to-compre ...
June 17, 2013
Those who run TIME magazine are virtual card-carrying members of a globalist elite that constantly seeks a more internationalist business and economic environment. This "poll" can surely be seen as just another "limited hangout" designed to protect the agenda o ...
June 17, 2013
President Obama announced late last week that the US intelligence community had just determined that the Syrian government had used poison gas on a small scale, killing some 100 people in a civil conflict that has claimed an estimated 100,000 lives. Because of ...
June 16, 2013
The Daily Bell is pleased to present this exclusive interview with Richard Ebeling. Daily Bell: It seems like a symptom of a larger dysfunction. You wrote an article recently implying the US was slipping into fascism. Is that a present danger, in your view? Ric ...
June 15, 2013
Over at The Atlantic, Zachary Karabell has discovered a double standard regarding corporate versus private "big data surveillance." We're approaching the issue all wrong, he writes. We should not accept that the issue is American freedom versus potential Big Br ...
June 15, 2013
Naomi Wolf has doubts, too. A brilliant libertarian, she is seeing what we see regarding this affair. We've written about it already. You can see the article here: Is Snowden for Real? Doubts Set In Our doubts about Snowden have to do with the tremendous amoun ...
June 15, 2013
Surely this is a trouble number, that only ten percent of the US population has any confidence in the US Congress. Of course, we are aware that these same individuals may have more confidence in their own congressperson than in the larger group. But still this ...
June 15, 2013
This Bloomberg article is a good example of an emergent dominant social theme ... that private contractors work with the government for the good of the republic. The article actually quotes a top government man as saying this. Our question is ... what republic? ...
June 14, 2013
First Occupy Wall Street and now the G8 protests – the efforts at further demonizing free-markets seems to be failing. It has an old history, of course, going back to US hearings in the 1930s that created public markets, self-regulatory organizations and, in ...
June 14, 2013
Free-Market Analysis: The research by Morse and Tsoutsoura (see above) continues to make a splash and has been codified in this Spring issue of Chicago Booth magazine because it offers government officials a new way of calculating tax evasion. By using bank loa ...
June 14, 2013
Is Hollywood relying on superheroes to create mass-marketed movies because society's dominant social themes don't work anymore? All human societies rely on cultural myths to provide the "glue" of commonality. But what can you say about a culture that uses made ...
June 14, 2013
In both Britain and the US, public broadcasting is responsible for the cult of the politician. These programs regularly market the genius of Churchill, Lincoln and FDR. Other leaders are equivalently demonized. Bureaucracy is held up as absolutely necessary. Th ...
June 14, 2013
The Internet does us the favor of occasionally freezing people's beliefs in a kind of intellectual amber. Even top pundits are revealed this way. R. Emmet Tyrrell, an eminent conservative commentator and longtime editor of The American Spectator, a droll and wi ...
