STAFF NEWS & ANALYSIS
Showing 4501 - 2 of 2
November 11, 2013
If you are an aficionado of dominant social themes the way some are fans of fine cigars, then Der Spiegel is the Cohiba Esplendido of Western mainstream media, ranking right up there with The Economist and the Washington Post. This article is so full of dominan ...
November 11, 2013
One of the least discussed, but potentially most significant, provisions in President Obama's budget is the use of the "chained consumer price index" (chained CPI), to measure the effect of inflation on people's standard of living. Chained CPI is an effort to a ...
November 10, 2013
First, investors need to stop watching the Wall Street propaganda channels commonly known as Fox Business and CNBC. This is like trying to learn about true love and healthy relationships on a porn channel. Second, as much as Wall Street and the US insurance car ...
November 09, 2013
Forbes has posted an article, "New York Is The New Power For Silicon Valley Tech IPOs," explaining the Valley is now subservient to New York. But was Silicon Valley ever really in charge? This article will make the point that the balance of power never really s ...
November 08, 2013
IPOs sometimes catch the spirit of the times and Twitter certainly did. A company that allows people to send out tiny messages to lots of "followers" is worth US$25 billion or so based on yesterday's IPO. The company sits on the Big Board where Ford sits, where ...
November 08, 2013
We can see from this bit of news (published before the Cuccinelli loss in Virginia) that it is "open season" on the Tea Party and libertarians. The mainstream parties are united only in their disdain and fear of what can certainly be characterized as a growing ...
November 08, 2013
"No legal issue arises when the United States responds to a challenge to its power, position, and prestige." Dean Acheson, 1962, speaking to the American Society of International Law. Dean Acheson declared 51 years ago that power, position and prestige are the ...
November 07, 2013
Directed history? The top men in banking and industry want a world currency. John Maynard Keynes, the most influential economist of post-World War II decades, suggested that something called the bancor be formed, perhaps based on a basket of currencies. This is ...
November 07, 2013
This opening Bloomberg excerpt describes "a retired software engineer" who believes the Tea Party has hijacked his party. Our question: What party is he talking about? And here is another question: Just what the hell is the Tea Party? Perhaps the Bloomberg arti ...
November 07, 2013
In textile factories, they were called "scavengers." The typical scavenger was about six years old, and the child's job was to reclaim loose cotton that fell under the machinery. Because the machines kept operating, terrible injuries were commonplace. History p ...
November 06, 2013
We've often written about directed history and how elites put in place historical justifications for war, political movements, economic episodes and, of course, market movements. The current convulsion of stock market activity is very much a kind of directed hi ...
November 06, 2013
This is one of those Guardian articles where you can almost hear the newspaper's inner socialist shouting come out. The trouble is that the Guardian writers and editors are having trouble building the proper workers' narrative. Instead of pointed, even dramatic ...
November 06, 2013
The most prominent of Austrian economists was the late F.A. Hayek. He won the Nobel Prize in economic science – shared it with Gunnar Myrdal whose ideas in the discipline of political economy were nearly the opposite of Hayek's – in 1974. His last book, The ...
November 05, 2013
Every week or month, Bloomberg editors attack gold and this article, striking out at chief gold bug Peter Schiff, is more of the same. The bias is subtle but apparent. The article manages to point out that Schiff's father is in jail for tax evasion and that Pet ...
November 05, 2013
We remember the Internet IPO boom nearly 15 years ago and how it ended in tears for so many. Now we've got a new boom on our hands, apparently, if Facebook and Twitter provide us with accurate evidence of what's going on. Of course, as indicated many times, we ...
November 05, 2013
For centuries inflation has been considered a quick fix for economic problems. Create a lot of money, raise prices, and prosperity for all shall be assured in a short amount of time. With the US economy stuck in slow growth and a relatively high rate of unemplo ...
November 04, 2013
There was a brief moment when Ron Paul was breaking away from the field and was even threatening Mitt Romney several months before the convention. Then all hell broke loose. Ron Paul reps were beaten up and various rule changes were rushed through benefitting R ...
November 04, 2013
Was this IPCC report leaked on purpose? A strange coincidence anyway. Follow the logic ... Saturday's editorial at The Daily Bell pointed out that James Cameron was leading the charge to cover global warming through the eyes of world-famous Hollywood stars. Mea ...
November 04, 2013
October was Iraq's deadliest month since April, 2008. In those five and a half years, not only has there been no improvement in Iraq's security situation, but things have gotten much worse. More than 1,000 people were killed in Iraq last month, the vast majorit ...
November 03, 2013
It's not only the US; it's the entire world. In the next Trends Journal in the "Epiphany" piece that I'm doing I've come up with the epiphany that this is not globalization; it's multinationalization. What we're looking at is a corporate takeover of such great ...
November 02, 2013
The party is on. And you read it here first. As we observe this phenomenon, we realize that global warming is going to play a big role in Wall Street's upcoming and ongoing promotion. But let's take it from the top. Several things just happened that confirm a f ...
November 01, 2013
This is surely a blossoming dominant social theme. The bigger you are in the 21st century, the more you owe society. But like all such memes, you need to turn it upside down to fully comprehend its awfulness. This is nothing but a high-stakes hold up on Gross's ...
November 01, 2013
We used the word "country" above to exaggerate a logical flaw: There is no "country." There is a Swiss culture but from what we can tell, the people partaking of the culture are not in any way happy with UBS regardless of how the "bailout" turned out. Why shoul ...
November 01, 2013
Readers ask me if Paul Krugman could be correct that deficits don't matter and that neither does printing endless reams of money with which to purchase the Treasury's debt instruments that finance the deficits. If people at home and abroad who hold dollars and ...
October 31, 2013
Just in case there was some doubt about the amount of monetization going on, we present this report by Ambrose Evans-Pritchard via the UK Telegraph. "The most extreme excess of global liquidity ever," JP Morgan tells us. That's a significant statement. We've wr ...
October 31, 2013
Who on Earth commissioned this article from the BBC? From the point of view of dominant social themes and the dialectic it is an admirable piece of work but from every other standpoint it is a miserable failure. A few decades ago, we wouldn't be commenting on i ...
October 31, 2013
Few aspects of America's past are as thoroughly misunderstood as the history of the labor movements that thrived in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The modern union that arose and usurped their place was the antithesis of what it claimed to be. It did n ...
October 30, 2013
We've written many times that the United Arab Emirates was being used as a laboratory for Western finance. Well, they are, you see! This article certainly seems to confirm it. (Thanks, Hugo.) Here's more. "For years people have been talking about creating an Is ...
October 30, 2013
Printing a lot of money is really helping the Japanese economy, according to the International Monetary Fund. In fact, according to the IMF, there's plenty of room to do more if need be. This is part of a larger trend we've been observing of late. Whether it is ...
October 30, 2013
To be prudent amounts to making sure that one takes good care of oneself in all important areas of one's life. Health, wealth, family, friendship, understanding, etc. are all in need of good care so that one will achieve and sustain one's development as a human ...
October 29, 2013
This article is truly scary. Like a bullet across the bow, or the crack of a whip, it announces with certainty that the world's top bankers intend to blanket the world with faux currency. They don't give a hoot. They're out to give us the business and bust the ...
October 29, 2013
In the other article in this issue, we indicated that the sociopaths running central banks were not going to be satisfied until they'd inflated markets far past where they've ever been logically or historically. But there is one caveat to this scenario that Blo ...
October 29, 2013
Nobel prize-winning Keynesian economist Lawrence Klein died on October 20, 2013, at the age of 93. A long-time professor of economics at the University of Pennsylvania, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1980 for his development of econometric (or statistical) m ...
October 28, 2013
Talk about "crocodile tears." This McClatchy article lists why foreign leaders are upset with the US but hardly a word of it is true. It's part of a larger narrative now being established that the US is losing its "leadership position" and that like other might ...
October 28, 2013
We've written in the past about how certain European Union leaders made statements that a fiscal crisis would eventually drive a deeper political union. Well, they got their crisis, a rolling one, but the deeper union is taking a good deal of time to consolidat ...
October 28, 2013
Last week it was reported that Saudi Arabia decided to make a "major shift" away from its 80 years of close cooperation with the United States. The Saudi leadership is angry that the Obama administration did not attack Syria last month, and that it has not deli ...
October 27, 2013
Antal Fekete: The liquidity trap is claptrap invented by Keynes. If the Fed is trying to fend off deflation, then it is using counter-productive means to achieve its ends. Paradoxically, ZIRP (zero interest rate policy) has the effect of destroying capital. It ...
October 26, 2013
An article in Salon was recently brought to our attention by Hugo, a feedbacker. It is entitled "Elites' strange plot to take over the world." Thanks, Hugo. Appearing about a month ago, it is basically an admission of the entire globalist enterprise over the pa ...
October 25, 2013
This is kinda out of the blue. Broke individuals tend to borrow on the off chance that they'll be able to reimburse the money next time round. Usually that doesn't happen, which is why it is a bad reason to borrow when you're already not making it. Better to pu ...
October 25, 2013
Are you a Keynesian? So many seem to be. Do you really believe that a properly functioning, mathematically literate approach to high finance can salvage what's left of the financial systems of the US, the West, the entire world? Top central bankers apparently d ...
October 25, 2013
The year 2014 could be shaping up as the year that the chickens come home to roost. Americans, even well-informed ones, don't know all of the mistakes made by neoconized and corrupted Washington in the past two decades. However, enough is known to see that the ...
October 24, 2013
Facebook is an example of how corporate America has gone off the proverbial tracks. It is, unfortunately, a powerful signifier about how finance works in the 21st century, in the West anyway. It surely holds various lessons for investors. For speculators, ident ...
October 24, 2013
This article was posted at the Drudge Report and elsewhere with a headline referring to its claim of US$1 billion dollars a day in expenditures. The real news, therefore, was not that the world's spending was "flatlining" but that a billion was being spent ever ...
October 24, 2013
The much vaunted class conflict between rich and poor is political fraud on stilts. It comes from a bastardization of class analysis that is used to divide people who might otherwise unite and turn against the true threat: the state. In reality, entrepreneurs a ...
October 23, 2013
There has been criticism aimed at the free-market economic paradigm over the past few years. But as far as we can see, it's been correct. In fact, as we can see from this excerpt, the only model that makes any sense these days is the one that has predicted for ...
October 23, 2013
We hardly know what to make of this. The US Federal Reserve is responsible for maintaining a healthy level of employment and also a stable money supply. It doesn't do either because it can't, and thus has now received what is basically a third vast responsibili ...
October 23, 2013
One of the major differences between individualists and communitarians is that the latter believe the individual human being belongs to his or her community. Whatever decisions men and women make, it must square with what is best for the community, for the trib ...
October 22, 2013
Just when we believed the lunacy couldn't get any worse, here comes The Economist magazine with a diagnosis for fixing what ails the US: Print more money. Print it hard and fast. This analysis focuses on the proverbial "liquidity trap." It is, of course, a Keyn ...
October 22, 2013
We retain a level of respect for Swiss society, though the Swiss political class seems to be doing what it can to damage what's good and increase the bad. The article seems to show the Swiss are fighting back. The Swiss bank-based economy is certainly under att ...
October 22, 2013
The news shows and the editorial pages of America's mainstream media have all focused on the claimed extremism of the Tea Party conservatives in bringing about an apparent partial government shutdown and trying to prevent an increase in the national debt limit. ...
