EDITORIAL
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January 24, 2015
We've been covering the Economic Forum in Davos from the standpoint of its "mood" ... which is said to be distinctly downbeat this time around. But I want to comment on notable speeches being presented by various august personages. First up is Bill Gates who ac ...
January 23, 2015
The "big brains" gathered in Davos are mostly successful in material terms and powerful from the standpoint of our modern economic system. But in the early 21st century, these attributes may prove ephemeral. And that's probably the reason for the gloom that is ...
January 23, 2015
The drumbeat advocating additional sanctions against Putin and Russia is evident in this Bloomberg "editors" editorial. It is this attitude that will support a continuance of the Ukraine standoff. From what we can tell, the episode was initiated by the West to ...
January 23, 2015
Dictionaries broadly define a safe haven as a place of refuge or sanctuary. I'm using the term to describe a hoped for place of security if a future catastrophe should take place. Possibilities include a major natural disaster, the coming end of the forced petr ...
January 22, 2015
We never believed the Fed would tighten. And we don't. Not really. We've regularly made statements to that effect. If Fed officials do "tighten" – we figure they'll find some other way to loosen. The money printing goes on. And now here come reports to the ef ...
January 22, 2015
A judge is about to rule on the dangers of cannabis and the ruling may well contradict the federal DEA when it comes to sustaining the position that it is as dangerously addictive as heroin. But there is a larger issue here, which is how fedgov arrived at such ...
January 22, 2015
The true and staggering rate of incarceration in America is masked by the unconventional cages that are rarely factored into the head count. Many people are caged in an unconventional manner for trivial and nonviolent offenses such as driving without a license ...
January 22, 2015
No matter what the politicians might say about how great America is, the fact is that the nation seems to be imploding. Consider the following facts: Our government is massively in debt. Currently, the national debt is somewhere in the vicinity of $18 trillion. ...
January 21, 2015
Again we see the adoption of a dialectical position. The mainstream media has been in full cry over the necessity for money printing and central bank bond purchases. Now, comes a BIS former official – apparently someone with considerable clout – who says ex ...
January 21, 2015
Jim Rickards's column has created a stir among alternative media commentators. GATA's Chris Powell posted a column of his own, commenting on it favorably. Of course, GATA has devoted many years to exposing gold (and silver) manipulation, so Rickards's column at ...
January 20, 2015
The West's economic system, we know now, regularly strips people of wealth. Monopoly central banks debase the currency via money printing and large corporations make entrepreneurialism difficult. If Obama wanted to revive the middle class in the US, he would ha ...
January 20, 2015
Is this sudden interest in mapping farmland a back-door justification for the advancement of Big Agriculture? Will it justify as well a sudden drop in food production and rising farmland prices across the board? The idea of this article is that farmland must no ...
January 20, 2015
The recent brutal events in France have reminded us how small the world is that we all share. Violence and conflicts that have their origin in one part of the globe shows itself in another part of our planet. And mass media immediately shares those events with ...
January 19, 2015
So now it begins. Last week the EU Court of Justice advocate general ruled that the central bank could purchase sovereign debt. One by one, the hurdles are toppling and the reality of ECB market purchases grows closer. Of course, last year the German constituti ...
January 19, 2015
This article features a mainstream newspaper reporting clearly what we already know but have rarely seen admitted in the mainstream: Big business and big finance equally have lost the "trust" battle. The paradigm is no longer believable. Having made the admissi ...
January 19, 2015
Since the creation of the Federal Reserve in 1913, the dollar has lost over 97 percent of its purchasing power, the US economy has been subjected to a series of painful Federal Reserve-created recessions and depressions, and government has grown to dangerous le ...
January 18, 2015
We have this issue now with patent law where we have a number of entities out there that aren't making any products, don't want to make a product but what they want to do is acquire dated patents, older patents, and then come up with a legal claim that some oth ...
January 17, 2015
Common Dreams has posted an article entitled, "In Just 60 Years, Neoliberal Capitalism Has Nearly Broken Planet Earth ..." The idea according to researchers at the Stockholm Resilience Centre is that "four of nine planetary boundaries have now been crossed as a ...
January 16, 2015
The meme is strong in this one, apologies to Star Wars. Every time we turn around, we're seeing more mainstream reports about the dangers of deflation. Now, having rejected their gold referendum, the Swiss have de-pegged their currency from the floundering euro ...
January 16, 2015
Over and over magazines churn out reports on the best places for retirement. The suspects are usually much the same names from year to year. But we are never to know all the variables, or why the countries place where they do in these rankings. In the case of C ...
January 15, 2015
Bitcoin is not worth what it used to be mostly in our view because of various "raids" by authorities that have tied the crypto-currency to bad actors and "drug dealers." But we want to make another point. This Economist article shows us once more how one can wr ...
January 15, 2015
Why is inflation good? Why is disinflation or deflation bad? We know what Murray Rothbard believed because he told us: In a free-market economy, there would be gentle deflation because technology constantly made goods and services less expensive. He had no prob ...
January 15, 2015
A legion of the politically correct who make a living from the alleged oppression of women were gleeful and almost goofy with proofiness this week. The incident is a window into how statistical myths are created. Charles Seife, a journalist and a professor at N ...
January 14, 2015
The deflation meme remains in full cry in Western media. Europe is in a deflationary morass and only Mario Draghi and a Brussels QE can save Europe from appreciating currency. Japan is printing as hard as it can and China is revving up the presses once again. B ...
January 14, 2015
Actually, we are not surprised by this sort of article. It is a bubble article and bubbles are blowing up everywhere – East and West. Central banks are printing and rates are lowering despite the doom and gloom regarding inflation. The asset bubbles are right ...
January 13, 2015
In our view, there is a kind of cold war going on between the US and Russia. The US worked to destabilize Ukraine from what we can tell and now along with Saudi Arabia has caused the price of oil to plummet. Low prices for oil put pressure on Russia's economy a ...
January 13, 2015
Years of protesting Monsanto's business practices may be having an effect. Monsanto is well known for various questionable business practices that result in lawsuits and often put significant burdens on small farmers who cannot afford continued litigation. But ...
January 13, 2015
Friends of freedom often become despondent when it seems that every day brings another growth and intrusion of government over people's lives. But there is no reason to be disheartened, because there are lessons for winning liberty – from the opponents of fre ...
January 13, 2015
After the tragic shooting at a provocative magazine in Paris last week, I pointed out that given the foreign policy positions of France we must consider blowback as a factor. Those who do not understand blowback made the ridiculous claim that I was excusing the ...
January 12, 2015
The Internet Reformation continues. The point of this article is that the Crash of 2008-2009 has given rise to an academic confrontation between professors and students regarding how economics is taught. But for us, the Internet as well must play a role in this ...
January 12, 2015
We are always on the verge of a recovery and then rates will have to move up. That seems to be a fairly consistent mainstream meme. But in the meantime, of course, rates are NOT going up. And this fits into our larger perspective that in a monopoly-fiat central ...
January 12, 2015
The hypocrisy of American police is beginning to bother even law and order conservatives. The New York Police Department is rivaling the black community in Ferguson in keeping alive the murders of their community members. We are constantly reminded of how dange ...
January 11, 2015
Gold coins are the most marketable instruments known to man. Its holder can trade on the best terms possible. Gold bills are the second most marketable instruments. Demand for them is virtually unlimited. Banks overflowing with gold coins scramble to expel them ...
January 10, 2015
As we predicted long ago, cannabis is gradually emerging as an industry. Those of us who saw the opportunity knew the large money would be made as the market gradually developed venture-capital and IPO participation. That's what is occurring now. Ultimately, th ...
January 09, 2015
This is a continuation of the Wall Street Party meme. We don't believe the Fed has any intention of disinflating, let alone deflating (not seriously anyway) but just in case something happens … here comes Bloomberg to inform us that it doesn't matter. Not to ...
January 09, 2015
The big problem with modern Western medicine is that everything has to be turned into a chemical before it can be marketed. No chemical, no profit, as no one can patent a plant. But if you can mimic the effects of that plant, without using the plant, or use the ...
January 09, 2015
If Americans were honest with themselves they would acknowledge that the Republic is no more. We now live in a police state. If we do not recognize and resist this development, freedom and prosperity for all Americans will continue to deteriorate. All liberties ...
January 08, 2015
This article is a good example of an EU "leadership" meme. This is actually two themes in one. The first, oft promoted meme is that the EU has devolved into Germany's back yard. It is Germany's union to run as it wishes. The second meme is that leaders like Ms. ...
January 08, 2015
Nowhere is the foundering of the American Dream more evident than in many US suburbs. Suburbs used to lie at the confident beating heart of the American Experience. Now they are prostrate baggage of an ill-conceived social experiment. Suburbs, initially called ...
January 08, 2015
Microaggression. The word may soon be knocking on your door to demand supplication or another form of payment. Microaggression is the new politically correct campaign being launched by "disadvantaged" elites who are running out of even vaguely real transgressio ...
January 07, 2015
The technocracy meme constantly reemerges. In this case we know why. UKIP, the quasi-libertarian, anti-EU party, is emerging as a potential political winner and many in British leadership are aghast. Solution? Combine forces. This is an idea constantly being pr ...
January 07, 2015
We've written quite a bit about the questionable legal theory behind insider trading and US courts are now starting to agree with us. One point we made on several occasions was that there was no specific statute against insider trading. This was because – or ...
January 06, 2015
It's been pointed out elsewhere on the Internet that the resumption of TPP talks last month was not exactly top news in the Western media. You would think the Western media would be covering this world-changing negotiation, as it affects the flow of information ...
January 06, 2015
We've pointed this out before, but this is another meme that is fast advancing. The idea of disinflation – especially – throughout the West and especially in Europe is being propagated regularly now. We've pointed out regularly that it is difficult to have ...
January 06, 2015
With the beginning of 2015, what might be a "New Year's resolution" for a friend of freedom? I would suggest that one answer is for each of us to do our best to become "lights of liberty" that will attract others to the cause of freedom and the free society. Fo ...
January 05, 2015
The best way to make sure capitalism becomes more popular is to give people the opportunity to take a bigger stake in it. That's the argument of the head of the London Stock Exchange, Xavier Rolet. He's not only convinced of capitalism's benefits; he also belie ...
January 05, 2015
This is not so much an analysis of gold as one of Bloomberg's regular negative assessments of the yellow metal's future. Bloomberg, as a media product, supports the agenda of major Western investment banks and central banks. There is not a lot of affection amon ...
January 05, 2015
Since New Year's is traditionally a time for resolutions, and since the new Congress convenes this week, I thought I would suggest some New Year's resolutions for Congress: 1) Bring the troops home — Congress should take the first, and most important, step to ...
January 04, 2015
Like everything else in the process of social change, it doesn't happen overnight. Consider, for example, the environmental movement. When we were kids, just getting people to stop throwing garbage out of the car window was considered a great environmental vict ...
January 03, 2015
In a staff report this week, we made some predictions regarding next year. The staff article was entitled, "Some Modest New Year Predictions Based on Dominant Social Themes." Our conclusion is what I want to discuss more thoroughly. We wrote: "Examine where ass ...
