STAFF NEWS & ANALYSIS
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May 15, 2009
We've noticed how Jim Rogers seems to have raised his profile recently, and the only reason we can come up with is that he wants the world to notice what he's investing in. But in providing so much information, he is also muddying the free-market message and le ...
May 14, 2009
Before this business cycle is finished, the currencies of the Western world may well be in tatters, the European Union may have collapsed and the credibility of the American Federal Reserve may be badly damaged as well. We reported on part of the story yesterda ...
May 13, 2009
The Grayson/Coleman confrontation has to be seen to be believed, and even then it may not seem quite believable. How could the Fed, in all its monied majesty, offer up someone so unprepared to answer the questions of a single quiet and persevering congressman. ...
May 12, 2009
The budget Obama has released, borrowing 50 cents on every dollar is NOT the result of problems left over from the Bush administration. Probably at least half of it is dedicated either to economic stimulation (which is destructive to the real economy in the lon ...
May 11, 2009
We think it is reasonable to speculate that panic takes over for most middle and working class people long before they get to the point of creating a reasonable contrarian strategy. They fear, rightly, that it could all come tumbling down, even though investmen ...
May 09, 2009
We have a hard time believing this all will work as planned. The idea that central banks are to be empowered to monitor systemic risk is especially ironic given that central banks create the instability in the first place by over-printing money. What this sort ...
May 08, 2009
Two possibilities occur. One is that this time round the monetary elite has simply run out of the political capital necessary to staunch the price inflation, in which case gold and silver will go sky high. The second possibility is that they do hike rates to 20 ...
May 07, 2009
Sure, and it did for Amtrak, too - just not for investors. We were trying to figure out where GM and Chrysler were headed when we came upon an article recently by free-market financier Peter Schiff in which he stated that the outcome of the government's interfe ...
May 06, 2009
This is a fragile sort of recovery indeed, and it the basic reason why Bernanke sounds schizophrenic. He understands that a Fed-led recovery inevitably starts with the banking industry, translates itself gradually into equity growth and from there kick-starts t ...
May 05, 2009
Commercial real-estate in America and abroad will surely constitute the next wave of defaults. Perhaps it will not be as severe a wave as the one that came before, but we wouldn't bet on it. The hard money business cycle is in full-swing and the central bankers ...
May 04, 2009
Buffet is once again busy finding value that others don't seem to assess and reinvesting in the companies and brands that he thinks will provide the next big thing. The world's most brilliant investor is perfectly willing to investigate thousands of company bal ...
May 02, 2009
Well ... we have been trying to avoid reading (or writing) about Niman (again) because he has the inevitability of a broken record. But since he has such a high profile on the 'Net, and is so very quotable, we suppose we should rehash his background for readers ...
May 01, 2009
Obviously so. The leadership, worldwide is beginning to demand it. In America, Vice-President Joseph Biden advises citizens to avoid subways and planes. Mexico has closed its government offices and is urging businesses to shut. The European Union is warning aga ...
April 30, 2009
We stayed away from commenting on the swine flue sickness because we have learned from experience that once the mainstream media gets into full cry on a story, the story inevitably changes and the reporting is deficient, or at least inaccurate. In this case, th ...
April 29, 2009
We're not quite sure why the Obama administration has such an aching desire to nationalize America's banks, but it is becoming clearer and clearer that's the goal. Of course it couldn't happen to a more deserving bunch. The cynicism of America's banking class e ...
April 28, 2009
Does anyone who follows these sorts of issues closely believe that the regulatory solutions that Oddsson offers would have made a real difference? Iceland is in debt up to its ears, a nation ruined by paper money. But this situation is systemic. It has to do wi ...
April 27, 2009
Wall Street was wiped out less than a year ago. In September 08, we've read, the American banking system froze up and absent an injection of some US$700 billion the current paper money system would have foundered and failed. But just because the banking system ...
April 25, 2009
Do citizens of the West have confidence in their banks? Will they have more confidence in them if they survive "stress tests?" The question is a fair one given the nature and composition of the current industry. Given all that has happened to the financial syst ...
April 24, 2009
The European enculturation – despite stirrings of individual initiative – remains focused on government empowerment, at least to hear the mainstream media tell it. We have a suspicion, however, that the Internet has made inroads on such cultural conditionin ...
April 23, 2009
Water, food, energy, oil ... there just doesn't seem to be enough to go around. You know, there's even a theory that oil is abiotic (not a "fossil fuel") since oil wells keep filing back up in the United States and elsewhere. Say, maybe oil is manufactured deep ...
April 22, 2009
The recovery that the IMF is forecasting is not a recovery at all. What the IMF really means but won't say, is that it is going to take several years to basically build a new banking system with new players - even if the names don't change. Unfortunately, the ...
April 21, 2009
The rise of markets around the world and the six-week upward trend of American equity markets certainly excited the media financial presenters who were convinced that the V-shaped recovery was on. But of course it's not that simple. Top bankers in the United St ...
April 20, 2009
The tea parties are focused on this latter point -- taxation -- but the entire system is set up to ensure that individuals cannot easily control money nor keep it. This is not a helpful stage of affairs during a severe economic downturn (or at any time in fact) ...
April 18, 2009
We've offered the idea that the Western world is "overbanked" – that the biggest bubble of all is the banking bubble. This is a logical outcome in fact of central banking, which would naturally tend to its own industry and to its continual expansion. While so ...
April 17, 2009
No, we can't see the Chinese giving up on their own paper currency. We may be wrong but we think the allure of central banking will prove more attractive ultimately than building a commodity-based currency. We may be incorrect, and we hope we are. Certainly a c ...
April 16, 2009
The tea-parties are neither left nor right but Libertarian, and free market. On this issue, the waters are muddy indeed. While the mainstream media cannot ignore what is going on in America, and to a lesser extent Europe, it can still represent powerful interes ...
April 15, 2009
Where does this leave us? Those in government and even in economics have powerful incentives to employ classical trend-analysis while paying lip service to modern economics – which doesn't recognize it. The politics of scarcity will remain attractive to burea ...
April 14, 2009
The tea party protests taking place around the country in America are not merely a reaction to current events. They are part of a much larger movement that is anti-big-government and pro-freedom. It is fashionable to decry the possibilities for change in an era ...
April 13, 2009
We've been waiting a while. American insurance companies, like European ones, are heavily invested in a variety of instruments that are more or less shaky. In fact, it stands to reason that they have adopted the same kind of investment behavior and purchased th ...
April 11, 2009
Sure, maybe oil was the proximate cause of what is turning into a worldwide depression, but is it the trigger that matters or the aftermath? The current economic situation seems to have gotten so bad so quickly because of the amount of mal-investment that was g ...
April 10, 2009
What is going on is a definite re-alignment of the world from a financial standpoint. But even if one accepts the above point of view about money and power, what is occurring is neither as clear cut nor as simple as one might think. Why? Because one has to rem ...
April 09, 2009
The problem is so much deeper than aggregation. Scarcity made the product palatable. But it is less so every day. The major Western media regularly publishes and presents information that is misleading and filled with half-truths. Readers can find better and mo ...
April 08, 2009
Yes, it is the Internet, rolling on, telling the truth with every ebb and flow of the daily tide. And what a truth it is: That the ongoing manipulation of the money supply by powerful men (almost all men) for purposes of financial consolidation and sociopolitic ...
April 07, 2009
We shall be interested to see just how far and fast this notion of an IMF super currency travels. And we shall be even more interested to see – if it continues to be mentioned by such prestigious thinkers as George Soros – whether there will spring up in Am ...
April 06, 2009
The big idea of the monetary elite is to seek an ever closer union worldwide. But the Internet is likely fracturing the credibility of the participants. Strides will continue to be made, but the ground is crumbling, in our humble opinion. There is a vast free-m ...
April 04, 2009
Despite the great impact that Obama has had on world leaders, the reality of what has been accomplished and Obama's own personal understanding of what is actually going on remains suspect. He is a very young man for the world stage, with a Harvard law education ...
April 03, 2009
From a free-market standpoint the worst has seemingly been averted. No international regulator, no grand, immediate attack on banking freedom, no huge amount of money poured down the various rat-holes of failed global capitalism. Of course, incrementally, the l ...
April 02, 2009
He is one of the best free-market traders of all time. And again, with this downturn, he has made literally billions, betting against various currencies. Sooner or later we think he will bet against the US dollar and go out in a blaze of glory having made billi ...
April 01, 2009
We are not sure if a new monetary standard will be announced following the upcoming G20 meeting. But maybe the meeting's communique might hint at such thing. In any event, we are sure that anything that comes out of such meeting will not be market-based. How co ...
March 31, 2009
It is not easy to say with any certainty what is going on in the halls of global leadership. But it would seem that the groundswell of support for gold-as-currency has proven so powerful that it must be acknowledged at the highest levels. It is not yet being ac ...
March 30, 2009
If one concludes that the upcoming, tripartite formulation for increased global controls is the main aim of the G20 summit, then the controversy over additional funds to combat the current fiscal crisis may be seen as something of a sideshow. The by-now worldwi ...
March 27, 2009
Yes, it is fairly obvious that the monetary elite – central bankers and others – have decided for one reason or another that now is a good time to plump for a global currency. Like everything else in this modern day and age, the promotion is not especially ...
March 26, 2009
You could see them popping like metaphorical popcorn kernels yesterday, all over America and probably in Canada and the EU as well. So called conspiracy "nuts" jumping into the sky as if they'd been fried in oil and propelled heavenward. What likely bounced the ...
March 25, 2009
There is some difference yet between what Obama is trying to do and what Roosevelt attempted. But the difference is only one of method, not motive. Obama is a go-slow kind of fellow, at least compared to Roosevelt. But he has no problem with wage and price cont ...
March 24, 2009
We were all set to believe that Zhou came to his conclusions by himself, from rigorous study of the way the world works. But now we are not so sure. And here is a question that gives us a bit of a headache: Where does all this enthusiasm for the IMF come from i ...
March 23, 2009
The American and EU perspectives could not be farther apart. The American experiment was conceived as one in which each individual was sovereign and the state was the subservient entity. The EU is conceived of in exactly the opposite way. It was put together by ...
March 21, 2009
The farther away from the American Constitution – which still embodies bedrock principles to many -- that the federal leadership drifts, the worse the confusion and corruption becomes. The trouble is, when a country's founding mythos cannot be supported, even ...
March 20, 2009
Here's our question. If AIG has a potential US$1.6 trillion exposure, and it is JUST ONE COMPANY, how much more exposure is out there of this nature? Journos in business pubs throw around the figure US$400 trillion and it seems perfectly likely if, indeed, AIG' ...
March 19, 2009
The mythos - like preparations to entomb a mummy - is being painstakingly prepared. The wrappings are steeped in preservation fluids. The body is hollowed out. Certainly, the Federal Reserve could print all the money the "bailout" needs, but that would interfer ...
March 18, 2009
The argument over mark-to-market perpetuates the idea that better regulation can rationalize markets and prevent what just happened from happening again. But the whole stock market, from the definition of "public companies" to the regulatory apparatus that has ...
