STAFF NEWS & ANALYSIS
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November 05, 2009
Here at the Bell, we believe in civil discourse. Polity is part of civil society and civil discourse is often preferable to invective, all things being equal. And all things being equal, this article in the Wall Street Journal has got to be one of the stupidest ...
November 04, 2009
The UK Telegraph more than any other mainstream newspaper we read (at least on the 'Net) seems to make the occasional stab at analyzing what's really going on in the world. It's covered the desperate difficulties of Eastern Europe, the deepening troubles in Ire ...
November 03, 2009
Policy is reckless, not the system. Even when the British Financial Times – a preeminent mouthpiece of the monetary elite – tries to give us an unvarnished look at the world economy it ends up fudging it in our humble opinion. Let's try to unravel the above ...
November 02, 2009
We just finished pointing out in the article above that the prospect of a commercial real-estate crash did not quite jibe with the idea that America and Europe were powering their way toward vibrant economic recovery. In truth, the enormous amount of money that ...
October 31, 2009
The jobless recovery has begun. We don't think it's much of a recovery, though. We guess we're among the naysayers. We've figured that in America alone the numbers of jobless (those wanting jobs anyway) are between 20 percent and 30 percent. That's over 60 mill ...
October 30, 2009
Conservatives win? We just commented on this article as it appeared on the Gallup site, and now here comes a Telegraph follow-story that confirms pretty much everything we tried to point out. The article is in our opinion a kind of elegant gibberish, which conf ...
October 29, 2009
In the 1990s, Western central banks played at selling gold to "talk" the price of gold down. One after the other they lined up to microphones with mainstream media logos brandishing their stems to announce their respective central bank sales of gold. It was of ...
October 28, 2009
What exactly was the Afghanistan war about? We're still not sure. We believe that many others are unsure as well. We know initially, the war was about getting rid of Al Quaeda, but that was nearly eight years ago. Since then, the war seems to have morphed into ...
October 27, 2009
Conservatives advance? This is a great article that shows just how the manipulation of labels confuses ideological and political issues. Gallup purposefully chooses to define individuals as conservative, moderate or liberal, whatever those labels mean. In our m ...
October 26, 2009
Global warming - now climate change - is as good an example of a dominant social theme as we have got. It does seem, in writing about dominant social themes, that one is postulating a kind of conspiracy of the elite. But how else does one account for the kind o ...
October 24, 2009
So the idea is that smaller banks will take less risk. In America this concept was codified as Glass-Steagall and investment and commercial banks were split off from each other. In Britain, this bifurcation was never fully achieved. Thus it is we wonder if the ...
October 23, 2009
We've been pointing out the breadth and depth of the potential China financial bubble for years, but only recently has the mainstream media, timidly (in our opinion), begun to conclude that there may be a wee bit wrong with double-digit growth rates. Now comes ...
October 22, 2009
We have pointed this out before and given this article, excerpted above, it is probably a good time to point out again that there is nothing wrong with derivatives. They are an inevitable evolution of the marketplace based on the computer power that is coming o ...
October 21, 2009
This article, excerpted above, is a good example of how economic analysis can be confusing in the era of central banking. When money was asset-backed, everyone who used the stuff had a fairly good idea of what money was, actually, and how inflation worked. If t ...
October 20, 2009
They are keeping at it. In addition to forcing through the Lisbon Treaty, which is a big step toward building a United States of Europe, the EU mavens are continuing to move ahead with re-jiggered pan-European financial regulations. In this interview, excerpted ...
October 19, 2009
The Irish have voted against it. The British don't want it and neither do the French – who voted down just such a European United States a few years ago when the socialist leaders in Brussels still thought they had a chance of passing an actual constitution. ...
October 17, 2009
We think this article may be just a tad optimistic. We're not certain about a recovery of the larger economy any time soon either in the United States or Britain. But beyond this we have a question as to what Britain's economy would recover TO were it to recove ...
October 16, 2009
For some reason, George Schultz has decided to reopen the books on the "drug war" – which took further wing with the Reagan administration of which he was part. It seems there is a history of drug war veterans recanting as to the effectiveness and the validit ...
October 15, 2009
We ordinarily try to analyze news AFTER it happens, but in this case we can't wait. We think we know the gist of what Congressman Ron Paul (R-Tex) is going to say and it is not all that much different than what we have been offering on these pages. Of course a ...
October 14, 2009
Well, it is all going remarkably as we anticipated. After the Bush years of war and paranoia, America has a peacemaker as President. Barack Obama has even been given a peace prize to ensure that Americans and the rest of the world get the message that US is no ...
October 13, 2009
This will not slow down the energy misers one bit. The "conservation" train will chug down the track just the way global warming does in the face of an ever-broadening consensus that such fairy tales are just that. We call these "dominant social themes" – bed ...
October 12, 2009
Ms. Brown has done us the courtesy of continuing the dialogue on Brownism (Brownianism?) and we find it – and her point of view – more compelling (interesting, anyway) than ever. The issue of communitarianism, as she may be expressing it, is one of the grea ...
October 10, 2009
Still more emails continue to flow on this topic! We didn't really want to return to Ms. Brown who has been patient all week long while we have tried as best we can to unravel her perspective - and the perspective of her influences -- on money and the state. It ...
October 09, 2009
People will continue to support this trend until the cycle turns and the monetary elite are able to kick start fiat once more. Of course we are on record as stating that this time round reinvigorating fiat money may prove to be nearly impossible over the long t ...
October 08, 2009
As we continue to receive passionate and sophisticated emails regarding Ms. Brown and her economic thinking (see her Daily Bell interview, etc.), we are amazed by the fervency she inspires. We have been studying economics and money metals for decades and Ms. Br ...
October 07, 2009
Supposedly gold has moved up because the dollar is being threatened by a basket of currencies being developed by Saudi Arabia, Russia and some other countries, mainly in the Middle East.
China is supposed to be one of these countries but China holds close to ...
October 06, 2009
This article on the Huffington Post by Ellen Brown - whom we recently interviewed - is both provocative and forward-looking. We certainly can't say that Brown is a mainstream writer in the sense that she does not merely parrot various predigested elite promotio ...
October 05, 2009
This article by Bloomberg is a great example of why modern financial journalism (mainstream style) sounds so good and all-too-often could use more substance. Below, we will quote some more from the article, but even before we do, we want to point out that the B ...
October 03, 2009
The IMF is being intensely active. First IMF leaders have announced the development of risk tools that will warn the world of an impending calamity. Now IMF executives are drawing up plans to levy what is basically an international banking tax. These moves come ...
October 02, 2009
Free-Market Analysis: Boy, this is an exciting idea. The IMF, which until recently anyway, never met a country that it couldn't squeeze, is going to unveil a system that will predict financial crises. Since the IMF uses Keynesian (statist) analysis, we can't qu ...
October 01, 2009
Huh? Whaaa? We must have missed this "growth." Alan Greenspan hasn't though. The man who looks and sounds exactly as a central banker is supposed to look and sound is at it again. We've charted Greenspan's course in the past, and we must admit he is being more ...
September 30, 2009
First Spain and now Japan. The Telegraph is charting deflationary trends in one industrial economy after another. The problem in Spain apparently is that EU central bank demands make it impossible for Spain to print enough money to cushion its increasingly grim ...
September 29, 2009
One of the things that central banking does among other things is basically turn marketplace finance into radioactive waste. Mention hedge funds, private equity and derivatives and responsible people in Washington DC go apoplectic. Of course, in each instance, ...
September 28, 2009
We think that the problems with Spain do presage problems going on elsewhere in the world. We think, eventually, they will visit the United States as well. When we write "eventually" what we mean is that things will get considerably worse. We believe this becau ...
September 26, 2009
There are plenty of calls to get rid of the dollar as the world's reserve currency, and China has been leading the way because the Chinese hold so much American paper. Japan is another country that holds a good deal of American debt, and between them these two ...
September 25, 2009
Sarah Palin is apparently trying to resurrect the successful Republican – "conservative" – formulation that marked Ronald Reagan's tenure in office 20 years ago. Readers of the Bell will not be surprised. We predicted this back in early July when we wrote o ...
September 24, 2009
Harsh medicine? The thrust of this analysis, which appears on NewsMax, is that a second recession will achieve two goals: It will bring Republicans back into office and it will purge the economy of bad investments by major entities including large corporations ...
September 23, 2009
This article, excerpted above, is yet another reason, in our humble opinion, why McGraw Hill is trying to unload BusinessWeek, reportedly at one point for a buck. With all the commentary now on the Internet and even in the mainstream press about free-market eco ...
September 22, 2009
Here are the Bell, we have made points about China for several years that are gradually trickling into the mainstream, not because of our influence (we'd like to think so) but because Chinese leaders are saying basically the same thing. We recently reported on ...
September 21, 2009
More democracy please? It is sad to see the British nation ending with a whimper, as most legal authority to determine British society passes to Brussels. This is obviously what the British monetary elite and titular elite wish to have happen, but having it occ ...
September 19, 2009
It's the bankers' fault. Do the wise men (and women) at the Fed really believe, at this point in history, that the reason for excessive risk taking in the Western world has to do with how much bankers are paid? Wait ... apparently they do. ...
September 18, 2009
So the SEC, which missed the Madoff Ponzi scheme, is going to supervise Wall Sreet's ratings agencies in order to ensure ... what? That they provide information about company risk? That they allow the consumer to comparison shop? At the risk of sounding rude, w ...
September 17, 2009
The sage is concerned. This is the point that we, along with many others in the hard-money community, have made strongly in the recent past – that the Fed will not be able to finesse the looming monetary disaster stemming from its pump priming. Pump priming i ...
September 16, 2009
O boy, the Tories are coming. Osborne is celebrating because Prime Minister Brown, in announcing budget cuts has "capitulated" to the Tory perspective. Sensing victory in upcoming elections over the hapless, meretricious and thoroughly discredited Brown, Osborn ...
September 15, 2009
It is nice to see the chief economist of the BIS hopping on board the "realism train." White breaks ranks with the green shoots crowd to explain that numerous factors are weighing down the economy worldwide and these issues have not been done away with. They've ...
September 14, 2009
A sad episode international finance. One has to keep in mind that Iceland is a country of about 300,000 people. And yet the "suspicions of criminal activity" stemming from the collapse of one of the world's smallest central banks are likely to spread around the ...
September 12, 2009
Sheen and his fellow conspiracy theorists, the Post reported, also believe the Bush/Cheney regime and the CIA orchestrated 9/11 as a ploy to invade Iraq." The Post is owned by the conservative media mogul Rupert Murdoch. It is not surprising that a newspaper ow ...
September 11, 2009
A system that changes slowly. Actually, it is a system that changes not at all. We wrote the other day of a British banker calling for more social consciousness and decrying money-center banks evident parasitism in forceful terms. On and on he went, until he be ...
September 10, 2009
We have returned to gold analysis several times recently since gold busted through US$1,000 once again, only to have its reins pulled back rather quickly. But since gold is on the mind of many, and at least some of our readers, we are certain, it may be time fo ...
September 09, 2009
Of course Barrick held out. We tend to share what is an industry wide view that Barrick was perhaps invented at least in part to manipulate the price of gold and to keep the price down through various speculative means. It may have managed to do this very well ...
