STAFF NEWS & ANALYSIS
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January 07, 2010
CBS has a breathless scoop – the cameras were off at Newark airport and no one knew how to turn them back on. O, the humanity! We prefer to think of CBS's scoop as a metaphor for the larger "war on terror" which in our opinion is more and more verging on a ki ...
January 06, 2010
You have to hand it to Ben Bernanke, he is a most persistent man. He has decided that the Fed has to combat the bubbles it blows – or at least sound contrite and responsible and has been grappling publicly with ways to do so for some time. The trouble with co ...
January 06, 2010
We have promised our readers not to keep score when it comes to the collapsing memes of the power elite because life is not simple and these are very big promotions. Also, in many cases it is not clear what constitutes a promotional setback. If one believes for ...
January 05, 2010
o Gordon Brown and his comrade in catastrophe, Ed Balls, have decided to give British children the opportunity to learn from their example. British schoolchildren are to be provided with a curriculum that will help them better understand finance as they grow up ...
January 05, 2010
First Dubai - now Greece? Sovereign states were not considered bankruptcy material in previous decades, but now it seems such bankruptcies are perfectly feasible to fathom. No one thought Dubai would default - that's what happened didn't it, at least for a litt ...
January 04, 2010
This past week we celebrated the end of what most people agree was a decade best forgotten. New York Times columnist and leading Keynesian economist Paul Krugman called it the Big Zero in a recent column. He wrote that "there was a whole lot of nothing going on ...
January 04, 2010
On January 3rd, just after Meet the Press, NBC-TV broadcast a radio address by President Obama and while I have become nearly completely pessimistic, even cynical, about expecting anything uplifting from politicians these days -- I think there could be some and ...
January 04, 2010
This article is more a reflection of Austrian economics and free-market thinking than Ron Paul. However, we don't think Ron Paul will mind since he traces his inspiration back to the Austrian fathers such as Ludwig von Mises and would modestly hold that nothing ...
January 04, 2010
We've stayed away from commenting on this because inevitably the "facts on the ground" will change. But surprisingly, Haskell, who is an attorney and financial planner, has stuck clearly and quietly to his story in such a way that his account seems credible. Me ...
January 03, 2010
The editors of The Daily Bell are pleased to publish an interview with the distinguished libertarian thinker and free-market activist, Nelson Hultberg. Mr. Hultberg is a freelance writer in Dallas, Texas and the Executive Director of Americans for a Free Republ ...
January 02, 2010
The Gold Anti-Trust Action Committee Inc. today (Dec. 30th, 2009) brought suit against the U.S. Federal Reserve Board, seeking a court order for disclosure of the central bank's records of its surreptitious market intervention to suppress the monetary metal's p ...
January 02, 2010
I do not have a right to my car but I do have a right to buy, keep, trade and otherwise act in relation to my car. Rights are what define our range of free actions. In some cases the right to act garners us huge wealth, in others, fame, and in yet others it wil ...
January 01, 2010
While the entire world it seemed was united some time ago in praising the Chinese miracle, the Daily Bell (being compulsively contrarian) was in the midst of writing a series of articles about how the Chinese economy was actually the largest bubble economy in t ...
January 01, 2010
We have noticed this ongoing convergence between the Chinese and Americans that is starting to yield some surprising fruit. Certainly there was a lot of focus on the relationship (or lack of one in Copenhagen). But this is a clear example to us. The Americans a ...
December 31, 2009
We long ago warmed to the idea that the universe was in a sense electric – as electricity not gravity (whatever that is) could be the binding and organizing force. Of course, we are not scientists, so we do not know for sure, or even understand it that well ( ...
December 31, 2009
Well thank goodness that the American administration has stepped up to the plate and done the right thing - the bailouts of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac are apparently not even going to cost a cool trillion in taxpayer dollars all told. Of course, we're inclined ...
December 30, 2009
There are a lot of statistics cited in this article but like many articles with a mainstream tone, most of them are besides-the-point or shed little illumination about what is going on. First of all the jobless rate in America is closer to 20-30 percent, we fig ...
December 30, 2009
So Michael Daly of the NY Daily News wants the Homeland team to become more efficient by firing Secretary Janet Napolitano. He seems to believe that if you find the right technocratic police officer for the job that this blunderbuss of an unconstitutional burea ...
December 29, 2009
It is fairly incredible that Congress keeps recycling the same worn out solutions to central bank monetary stimulation. We think this can only be because Congress does not want to admit that the system itself is what's at fault. Also, if you blame regulations, ...
December 29, 2009
The interesting thing about this interview is that Summers felt he had to give it. The frustrating thing is what is left unspoken. It is all well and good for Summers to maintain that the administration is not interested in accumulating anymore power over the p ...
December 28, 2009
Mort Zuckerman (pictured above left) owns the Daily News as well as US News and World Report, and it is a somewhat melancholy event to see this sort of opinion presented by the man himself. One would like to see a more spirited defense of the free-market that h ...
December 28, 2009
This article is interesting because of the parallels to the situation in the United States. Barack Obama swept to power by guaranteeing "change you can believe in" - but his change proved of the socialist kind, as he harried Congress to spend trillions re-infla ...
December 27, 2009
The editors of The Daily Bell are pleased to present an exclusive interview with well-known Eurosceptic Robert Oulds. Mr. Oulds is the Director of the London-based Bruges Group, and an international political analyst who has made a specialty of analyzing and op ...
December 27, 2009
Last week on Christmas Eve, after many backroom deals were made, the Senate passed the healthcare reform bill with a strictly partisan vote. I was pleased that my colleagues in the GOP are on the right side of this bill. Although this vote was a major step in h ...
December 27, 2009
Bing Crosby dreamt of a White Christmas. Elvis Presley lamented about his Blue Christmas. This year, most Americans faced a Red Christmas, plagued by massive credit card, household and government debt. It has been a year of unprecedented public spending based o ...
December 25, 2009
Every year around the holidays, we reread the answer to the letter from little Virginia O'Hanlon. We like to read it because it reminds us of a simpler time in the American republic when the leveling trends that have overtaken the country were not so far advanc ...
December 25, 2009
This is a funny little squib of an article. But in a way it expresses as much about where we are today as Church's editorial (see other article today) expressed about his day. Church's editorial, "Yes Virginia" dealt with the timeless issues of a child's quest ...
December 24, 2009
Over the last couple of decades a colleague from a famous university has challenged me about my view that everyone has the unalienable right to private property. Now this position, derived from such sources as John Locke, the American Founders, Ayn Rand, and ma ...
December 24, 2009
So President Barack Obama believes that ensuring the financial system did not collapse was the "most important thing" he did this year. Well, what about the unemployment thing which many analysts put above 20 percent (and we think may be closer to 30 percent in ...
December 24, 2009
In our opinion, Samuelson was just one in a long line of apologists for state control who was useful to the power elite at a time when it was apparently important to try to underpin various power grabs (such as central banking) with some sort of intellectual ju ...
December 23, 2009
We are shocked by this article in the mainstream Canadian press and can only explain it as part of the (admirable) Canadian irritation with global warming in general. Canada and its strange people – entrepreneurial, tough-minded and communitarian (if there is ...
December 23, 2009
The idea that the Obama administration is concerned about US fiscal solvency is somewhat risible in our humble opinion. We have pointed out recently that the British powers-that-be have been busily reducing Britain to a smoking ruin over the past half century, ...
December 22, 2009
No one in the freedom movement today disputes that the Federal Reserve is the source of many of our economic woes. Where disagreement arises is in defining the precise nature of the Fed and the source of its capacity to create the harm it does. Many who support ...
December 22, 2009
Last week the House overwhelmingly approved a measure to put a new round of sanctions on Iran. If this measure passes the Senate, the United States could no longer do business with anyone who sold refined petroleum products to Iran or helped them develop their ...
December 22, 2009
Central bank money printing is so injurious and so pervasive that we don't see how any analysis of major stock markets can ever be seen as anything other than anomalous. What those who keep statistics are doing, in our opinion, is tracking the capricious nature ...
December 22, 2009
All this is quite clever, we think. Copenhagen was a promotion not just of global warming but, at bottom, an exhibition of how global problems demand global solutions. So clever and seamless is this promotion that the BBC can hold Copenhagen up as an example of ...
December 21, 2009
We agree with this article, but we would like to add to it. One has to look even deeper in our opinion. If one is to properly analyze the dominant social themes that the power elite injects into civil discourse, one has to mine the meme and keep mining. Take Pe ...
December 21, 2009
This is one great article (the Telegraph being head-and-shoulders above other mainstream publications from time-to-time in the subtlety of its analyses and the clarity of its conclusions.) In this case the writer, a brilliant leftist turned "to the right" - Jan ...
December 20, 2009
The editors of The Daily Bell are pleased to present an exclusive interview with well-known libertarian philosopher Tibor R. Machan. Mr. Machan is currently Professor Emeritus, Department of Philosophy, Auburn University, Alabama, and holds the R. C. Hoiles End ...
December 19, 2009
We know we will read over the next months and even years, especially if economic problems get worse, of dire predictions about people being herded into prison camps and other containment facilities because society itself is facing a breakdown. The stories will ...
December 19, 2009
Some of our editorial team have spent an extensive amount of time in Venezuela recently and now we will tell you the truth dear reader as we have come to understand it about Chavez and those surrounding him. It is somewhat different than Fox, the New York Post, ...
December 18, 2009
It seems to us that this endless ongoing currency consolidation is a very strange thing. When one looks at money, honest money, its history of individual empowerment stands out. Right now, money is going exactly the other way. You would think that market forces ...
December 18, 2009
The trouble with stories like this is that reinforce the worst suspicions about the war on terror. On the one hand, we have the dominant social theme that the war on terror is being fought by the guys in the white caps who are doing their best from their outman ...
December 17, 2009
By the time you are perusing this, dear reader, this story will be all over the Internet – and beyond. We try to avoid analyzing such ubiquitous stories on the whole because we try to direct you to important elements of the global-promotional dialogue that ha ...
December 17, 2009
We checked on the author of this article just to make sure – because each time we read Krugman we wonder all over again about the guy's background. But yes, "in 2008, Krugman won the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics for his contributions to New Trade Theory ...
December 16, 2009
It is our opinion that Peak Oil is a promotion of the powers-that-be, a positioning of energy resources so that the most power and wealth can be extracted from the least amount of product. Consider that in America especially - where we believe the promotion is ...
December 16, 2009
When we wrote a while back that NASA was lobbying for funds to monitor for meteoric emergencies, we didn't know how far the process had gone. Apparently, the US Congress itself has given NASA the mandate to search the heavens for tiny bits of gravel. The progra ...
December 15, 2009
There is a power elite, and Paul Volcker speaks for it. That's our opinion, anyway! And that's why we have already commented -- just the other day -- on Volcker's re-emergence as the oracle of common sense on all matters financial. The former chairman of the Fe ...
December 15, 2009
Now this is a remarkable article about an inquest into the Iraq War that is taking place in Britain. For all of Britain's implosion when it comes to civil rights - from the nation's indescribably incompetent socialist health care and education systems, to its e ...
December 14, 2009
Because of legal tender laws that force acceptance of the dollar, the Fed has absolute power over the currency. This absolute power is leading to the absolute corruption of our currency. The money supply has doubled in the last year or so, which is extremely da ...
