STAFF NEWS & ANALYSIS
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September 02, 2014
Reuters is astonished that people aren't so worried about global warming as they used to be. The editorial excerpted above spends a lot of time trying to figure out why this is so. Of course, maybe people are less worried because they have decided the threat ha ...
September 02, 2014
It is an old adage that there are lies, damn lies and then there are statistics. Nowhere is this truer than in the government's monthly Consumer Price Index (CPI) that tracks the prices for a selected "basket" of goods to determine changes in people's cost of l ...
September 01, 2014
Bloomberg offers two editorials on Europe that tell us economic growth is not going well. The one above speaks to the issue of Mario Draghi's lack of courage in terms of implementing a program of aggressive money printing. The other one, which we excerpt below, ...
September 01, 2014
This article can be seen two ways. One, the US tax regime that it is trying to install in Switzerland is being resisted, at least a little. On two, the news can be seen as a message that once its tax regime is in place, US officials are prepared to be flexible, ...
September 01, 2014
Last week President Obama admitted that his administration has not worked out a strategy on how to deal with the emergence of the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS) as a dominant force in the Middle East. However, as ISIS continues its march through Syria a ...
September 01, 2014
Earlier this month the New York Times wondered aloud if the "libertarian moment" had arrived. A good question, to be sure. To answer it, though, Times reporter Robert Draper sought out not quite the top libertarian thinkers in the world, but instead those peopl ...
August 31, 2014
When I first started to look at marijuana I went into the library, and this was in 1967, because many of my friends in Cambridge were using it and I would say to them, "You mustn't do that. That's harmful. You really shouldn't smoke that." I was an arrogant you ...
August 30, 2014
Dr. Henry Kissinger has written an article entitled, "Henry Kissinger on the Assembly of a New World Order" posted at The Wall Street Journal. It's an important article written by an important man. Dr. Kissinger, the Journal tells us, "served as national securi ...
August 29, 2014
The Economist magazine has decided a major problem with the US economy is that its largest multinational corporations and banks are being held for ransom by avaricious lawyers. The magazine in this issue reports that "Bank of America, JPMorgan Chase, Citigroup, ...
August 29, 2014
Even though half of Europe seems to be standing in breadlines, Eurocrats have other concerns. They keep pounding out unnecessary laws. The amount of regulation produced by Brussels is staggering but now the absurdity is ascending into the stratosphere as the EU ...
August 28, 2014
Bloomberg's Noah Smith is back with an editorial explaining that even though economics isn't a science, it's still a swell "culture." What's funny about this article is that Smith's admission as to what economics really is corresponds entirely to the points tha ...
August 28, 2014
How quickly times change. Yesterday, marijuana was a criminal offense virtually the world over. Today, research is finding that those who ingest it lessen their dependence on prescription painkillers and thus, apparently, are not so subject to their potential d ...
August 28, 2014
The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA or Obamacare) became law in early 2010. Arguably, it is the single greatest assault on the right of individuals to control their own bodies that America has seen in decades. Few matters are more intimate tha ...
August 28, 2014
Every public institution in the United States and most private ones are corrupt. To tell this story would be a multi-book task. Lawrence Stratton and I have written one small volume of the story. Our book, The Tyranny of Good Intentions, now with two editions a ...
August 27, 2014
Ellen Brown is back with another of her brilliant yet flawed analyses of the modern financial scene. Her idea, which she admits is not entirely original, is that the international debt paradigm is starting to change dramatically, to the further detriment of the ...
August 27, 2014
The high-profile website ZeroHedge caused a stir yesterday by presenting an article (see above) that appeared in the CFR's Foreign Affairs magazine. The article called for the Federal Reserve to hand out money directly to consumers. Wow. The article was of inte ...
August 26, 2014
What does the future hold? More and more money stimulation it would seem. China – the BRICS – and the US are printing endless gouts of money, and now it appears as if the European Union is headed in the same direction. In fact, the EU cannot simply print, a ...
August 26, 2014
Berlin is leading the way for neo-Luddites, confronting both Internet-based taxi services and lodging facilities. Most of the sectors where the Internet is having the most dramatic effect are heavily regulated and thus inefficient and lacking in consumer choice ...
August 26, 2014
For more than a decade, now, Federal Reserve policy has been guided by the fear of one economic bogeyman: the presumed danger of "price deflation." The fear is unfounded and the inflationary "solution" only leads to disaster. During Alan Greenspan's and Ben Ber ...
August 25, 2014
The moon is blue and we agree with Reuters. Yes, this is an unusual occurrence, especially with this particular columnist. But we do agree with his summation: Equity markets – especially the US market – are due for a correction, but not one that will necess ...
August 25, 2014
The big brains have figured out that capitalism is a failure. That's the gist of this UK Telegraph article. What's the solution? Enforced income equality, maybe even a universal living wage. We've written about that here: "Profoundly Immoral, Increasingly Popul ...
August 25, 2014
Many have wondered about the status of Galt's Gulch Chile (GGC), the libertarian community that was planned and sold in lots as a liberty oasis for those who wished to live freedom before they died. My husband and I purchased an option on 1.25 acres in July 201 ...
August 25, 2014
America's attention recently turned away from the violence in Iraq and Gaza toward the violence in Ferguson, Missouri, following the shooting of Michael Brown. While all the facts surrounding the shooing have yet to come to light, the shock of seeing police usi ...
August 24, 2014
I saw that we were leading the world in the incarceration of our people, both by sheer numbers as well as per capita, ruining people's lives and I decided the so-called remedy is worse than the disease – namely, of course, the drugs can be dangerous but they' ...
August 23, 2014
The Economist has just posted a "leader" for its latest issue entitled "What China Wants" that begins, "After a bad couple of centuries, China is itching to regain its place in the world. How should America respond?" This kind of approach to geopolitics is actu ...
August 22, 2014
Like Reuters, Bloomberg is a creature of the establishment and you can read Bloomberg editorials (especially) to garner an inkling about how we ought to be perceiving one of the most important dominant social themes of all: Central banking and the endlessly dis ...
August 22, 2014
The talk coming out of Washington is grim, as this short news analysis by Reuters shows. In only a month or two, an obscure insurgency making trouble in Iraq has turned into an existential Western threat. Just read: Hagel says "IS" is an "imminent threat to eve ...
August 21, 2014
If only the latest crop of central bankers had been smarter, wiser, more dynamic, then this crisis – or that one – could have been avoided. This is always the lament. The price-fixing mechanism – central banking – is never at fault. Only the bankers tha ...
August 21, 2014
This article in the UK Guardian profiles black- and gray-market growers in Colorado's booming post-prohibition marijuana environment. Unsurprisingly, it finds that decriminalization has not undone illegal acts nor removed the financial incentive from them. This ...
August 21, 2014
On June 17, 2013, the United States Supreme Court (SCOTUS) further eroded one of the most potent protections Americans had against unfettered authority: the right to remain silent. In Salinas v. Texas, SCOTUS ruled that a defendant's refusal to answer police qu ...
August 20, 2014
The deliberate and ongoing introduction of the disease which is Keynesian economics was perhaps not so evident prior to the Internet era, but thanks to the Internet we can see clearly how pervasive this faux-palliative is, as well as how ineffective and even ru ...
August 20, 2014
The author of this recent editorial in the Washington Post is Sunil Dutta. The Post tagline describes him as "a professor of homeland security at Colorado Tech University [and an] officer with the Los Angeles Police Department for 17 years." This is Officer Dut ...
August 20, 2014
Governments and their defenders insist that taking taxes from citizens in perfectly okay. As Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes alleged, it is "the price we pay for civilization." Like saying handing over your money to a hood amounts to paying for safety! Balderdash ...
August 19, 2014
What? Equities are up again? The Wall Street Party is yet in full swing? There's no logical explanation, of course, but those following securities will always try to make one up. And so we'll hear all sorts of strange reasons for yesterday's sudden climb. As th ...
August 19, 2014
This poll presents a stark statement regarding people's ability to save for the future. And actually, we believe it's much worse than it appears, given the poll's leading conclusion that 36% haven't saved anything. What about the rest? Have they saved more? How ...
August 19, 2014
Since the economic crisis of 2008-2009, the Federal Reserve – America's central bank – has expanded the money supply in the banking system by over $4 trillion, and has manipulated key interest rates to keep them so artificially low that when adjusted for pr ...
August 18, 2014
We expect Reuters to write about the economy from a central banking point of view and this editorial doesn't disappoint. But it also gives us a different perspective on a recent speech by Stanley Fischer, the vice-chairman of the US Federal Reserve. Fischer, we ...
August 18, 2014
With the benefit of hindsight, abetted by the Internet, we can see what may be the real agenda of the IMF. It is the other half of a globalist tag team that helps bankrupt third-world countries and then provides them the resources to rationalize their desperate ...
August 18, 2014
We have been at war with Iraq for 24 years, starting with Operations Desert Shield and Storm in 1990. Shortly after Iraq's invasion of Kuwait that year, the propaganda machine began agitating for a US attack on Iraq. We all remember the appearance before Congre ...
August 17, 2014
What we have had is a massive inflation of what I call "debt money" because actually, debt is the raw material from which fiat money is manufactured. You can see from this Debt/GDP chart that there has been a very modest reversal of total debt (public and priva ...
August 16, 2014
Things are "coming up roses" (or "buds") when it comes to marijuana decriminalization and legalization. In this editorial I'll share some recent fertile events in Canada and around the world. First, the CBC has just reported that a Canadian appeals court ruled ...
August 15, 2014
"Austerity" never made much sense to us because the economies of Southern Europe were shackled by decades of regulatory and fiscal overkill. It was like watching a man with his hands tied behind his back being thrust into octagon for a mixed martial arts fight ...
August 15, 2014
This is a startling study that seems to tell the truth about regulatory democracy: Voting is merely a ritual; power is concentrated in the hands of a few. We knew this already, and have written about it regularly. Still ... it's startling to see these sentiment ...
August 14, 2014
Another day, another poll. Let's examine this trend. We've been at the forefront of advancing the perspective that marijuana legalization is part of a much bigger elite strategy that actually involves the legalization of many other drugs as well. We've stated t ...
August 14, 2014
This article is written by the hard-bitten media reporter Jack Shafer who was fired by Slate in 2011. His firing caused a fuss in the journalistic community that takes such things seriously, as we can see from a report posted several years ago at The Wire: Reut ...
August 14, 2014
The term "kafkatrapping" describes a logical fallacy that is popular within gender feminism, racial politics and other ideologies of victimhood. It occurs when you are accused of a thought crime such as sexism, racism or homophobia. You respond with an honest d ...
August 13, 2014
It is probably true that the EU is slipping back toward "recession." But this not because the European Central Bank is constrained from offering the correct monetary policies, as this article implies. The ECB doesn't need more power or flexibility. The euro nee ...
August 13, 2014
This is a very interesting article because it shows the Anglosphere intel services are losing the ability to create realistic promotions. We are not surprised because we've been writing about this trend for years. Our perception is that the Anglosphere is under ...
August 13, 2014
For those of us who have escaped Draconian tyrannies and reached America, for a long time it may be difficult to adjust to the fact that American Leftists are every bit the fascists that some claim they are. As the late Susan Sontag put it, "Communism is succes ...
August 12, 2014
This article in the Financial Times is a good example of reporting on something without saying anything. That's not the fault of the Financial Times so much as it is of the vice-chairman of the Federal Reserve, Stanley Fischer. Fischer has given a Keynesian spe ...