STAFF NEWS & ANALYSIS
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January 02, 2015
Noah Smith has written another article about whether economics is a science or not, a subject that obsesses him for good reason. If economics is not predictive, what good is it in this day and age? In fact, the field is really only a few hundred years old, if w ...
January 02, 2015
This is a good analysis, in our view, of what might happen regarding Greece and its potential pushback to Brussels-imposed "austerity." No one knows the full story regarding the austerity that has been imposed on Greece, and other Southern European countries as ...
January 01, 2015
Ganesha has inspired us to make predictions for 2015. Our predictions focus on the trends we've covered this year. We begin with central banking, which is the engine driving most of the themes we observe. Central bankers will surely print money at an accelerate ...
January 01, 2015
The idea of this Atlantic article is that US governance generally is abdicating its responsibility to counteract lawlessness and this is fundamentally unbalancing US democracy. This is a perceptive point, though to ignore the legal and regulatory barrage genera ...
December 31, 2014
This article presents the idea that people are going to get so fed up with do-nothing politicians – hamstrung by gridlock – that they will rise up and demand a dictatorship. The logic fails to convince us, though the article is penned by an award-winning pr ...
December 31, 2014
This Bloomberg editorial purports to be puzzled by the "two faces" of Frau Merkel. But the solution to the puzzle is to recognize that Merkel is not powerful at all. Sound shocking? We'll expand below … Politicians in this day and age generally are not powerf ...
December 30, 2014
We've covered Piketty and his book in several articles but this article from Bloomberg shows how memes can be perpetuated even when the evidence for the meme is lacking. The article actually provides us with a cogent analysis of the wrongness of Piketty's argum ...
December 30, 2014
We've written about "organic" food because it's a "hot" trend. But we've also wondered whether the corporate farming model can adapt to organic approaches. We wrote about some of those issues here: When Choice Matters: Organic Food vs. Organic Investing. Consum ...
December 29, 2014
We almost missed this strange little article about some very big issues. Seems the Bank for International Settlements is upset with the Federal Reserve over its market posture. Fed officials want to regulate market risks and forego interest rate hikes. BIS offi ...
December 29, 2014
We are often critical of Bloomberg, but this is a pretty good editorial. At least we agree with part of it! We've been writing regularly about the inflation versus deflation debate and here comes Bloomberg taking an astonishingly clear-eyed position. Here's mor ...
December 26, 2014
Our suspicions about the Sony hack were raised when North Korea accused the US of involving its CIA. By then the story had been continuously presented by the mainstream media, always a sign that some sort of promotion was underway. And now the next shoe has dro ...
December 26, 2014
This editorial informs us that people may be surprised what happens regarding cannabis next year ... legalization at a federal level. Are you surprised? Certainly, the Republican takeover of Congress may be widely seen as an impediment to further drug legalizat ...
December 25, 2014
We checked 'Net search engines but there was little this year about the consumerist backlash against Christmas. We know it exists, but the mainstream media doesn't seem to be in the mood to comment on it. Then this recent MarketWatch article turned up. It estim ...
December 25, 2014
Robert Reich is back with his usual optimism about fixing Leviathan – see the above article excerpt. Who is Robert Reich? He is "the nation's 22nd Secretary of Labor and a professor at the University of California at Berkeley. His film 'Inequality for All' is ...
December 24, 2014
You would think that this market would already have foundered. The US recovery is suspect. Government price inflation numbers and employment numbers are unreliable at best. Most importantly, this stock market boom has been going on since late 2009. That's aroun ...
December 24, 2014
For years we had arguments with "peak oilers" who maintained that the world was running out of oil. Of course, they always objected to this simplified version of their arguments. Peak oilers liked to clothe their arguments in intricate statistics. The only peop ...
December 23, 2014
We can see in this Bloomberg editorial how central banks and their good, gray leaders are going to be positioned going forward. Assume that the US and Britain are in a "recovery" of sorts. Now mainstream pundits such as those that populate Bloomberg are going t ...
December 23, 2014
It looks as if the just-released report on the CIA and torture has blown up this tragic issue in a very public manner. And now, one way or another, the "establishment" has to deal with it. We dealt with this yesterday in our lead article entitled, "US Power Cen ...
December 22, 2014
The US is splitting apart: Some 60 years of expanding authoritarianism has created political and economic facilities that are now beginning to face off against each other. There are dozens of intel agencies, hundreds of military specializations, vast bureaucrac ...
December 22, 2014
Recently, High Alert announced the opening of an expat community in Colombia in an editorial by Anthony Wile, here: A New Free-Thinking Community for Your Life, Safety and Sanity! While the editorial was greeted with an overwhelmingly positive response, some of ...
December 19, 2014
The Fed has signaled that it has moved to a slightly tougher position regarding eventual rate hikes and the reverberations are felt around the world. The dollar has benefited so far and so have US stocks. But are the reasons being offered in the mainstream medi ...
December 19, 2014
We've mentioned that Reuters columnist Noah Smith is a "gift that keeps on giving." He's back with another such gift in this column, "Maybe There's No Such Thing as a Business Cycle." Actually, the article promises a bit more than it delivers. Smith doesn't act ...
December 18, 2014
The tech bubble of 2000 led directly to the crisis of 2008 because after 2000 central banks radically dropped rates and began to swell the monetary base. And now they are doing it again. There was, of course, a bobble when Ben Bernanke raised rates and we've of ...
December 18, 2014
Think of inflation as fire and deflation as ice. How will this latest asset reflation end? Will it subside into ice – a tremendous monetary and price deflation? Or will the current asset expansion continue into a catastrophe of fire? Often, as we've pointed o ...
December 17, 2014
Bloomberg was in full cry last night regarding a failing Russian economy. We've never seen anything like it on Bloomberg: The front page of the website carried a box on the top left hand corner filled with blaring stories. It is this latter editorial that we ar ...
December 17, 2014
In the Internet era it is increasingly difficult to actualize dominant social themes. An "actualization," of course, is a news story showing the validity of the meme or theme. Several years ago, the mainstream media tried to actualize the "thoughtless and bruta ...
December 16, 2014
A recent article of ours made the point that deflation and disinflation are unstable monetary states in an era of central banking. While we didn't draw precise definitional lines between various kinds of deflation, our point was clear enough: Deflation and disi ...
December 16, 2014
Warm weather often promises an abundance of food. But for global warming promoters, warmer weather is to be feared. Purposefully or not, "scientific" research, media reports and over-regulation form an unholy triangle of food scarcity. Simplify the explanation ...
December 15, 2014
This is an absurd article. US lifestyles and retirement possibilities have been on a downward arc since at least the turn of the century. And if one goes back and compares the 1950s to the present day, the current financial environment looks even worse. Since 1 ...
December 15, 2014
Gavin Seim and people like him are perhaps the fruit of this Internet era. They are educated and fervent about protecting constitutional freedoms. Yet there is a big difference between understanding what has been lost and regaining it. Seim is already on the ra ...
December 12, 2014
The idea behind this article is that openness is good and more openness is even better. The article makes a pretense of asking whether this is a sensible conclusion, but at the heart of the article is an argument for more transparency. The idea is that governme ...
December 12, 2014
Richard Gingras, Head of Google News, posted this update on Thursday, explaining that Google News would have to close in Spain. That's because Spanish legislators have decided that any time someone reproduces even a few words of someone else's writing, it is no ...
December 11, 2014
This is huge news, and it's definitely launched in a big way on the mainstream media. As of this writing, the situation is still in flux but from what we've read this legislation is taking place. Even if it doesn't happen this time, it's part of a trend that wi ...
December 11, 2014
This is a case of one step forward, one step backward when it comes to cannabis legalization. But in a sense the two occurrences we'll discuss here shed some light on the larger mechanism of legalization now taking place. The first occurrence is Congress steppi ...
December 10, 2014
The contradictions of the current "bull" market worldwide are catching up with the averages. Call it an equity "cognitive dissonance." Understandable turmoil in Greece combined with the puncturing of an "exuberant" Chinese stock market caused a sudden global se ...
December 10, 2014
So now it is general knowledge that the US tortured throughout the Bush administration ... and beyond. The publication of this information by the Senate Intelligence Committee is generating a massive wave of indignation around the world. The US has long been se ...
December 09, 2014
This is an interesting meme. Economists ARE influential, though not for the reasons that The Economist enumerates. In fact, we can make an argument that modern mainstream economics is entirely a manufactured science: in the past we've done just that. Anyway, th ...
December 09, 2014
This interesting survey confirms what has seemed obvious to us and our readers for years: That the 'Net is making people more informed, not less. This has proven to be, in our view, an unstoppable process and one that is sparking major social changes. We track ...
December 08, 2014
Wow. We've been banging the drum regarding the shady manipulations of Europe's founders for years now. But it looks as if those who have ignored this sordid history are gradually giving in. That's how life works in the Internet era. 'Net exposure eventually col ...
December 08, 2014
So it begins. In fact, we asked the question quite a while ago regarding the thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands in jail for using cannabis. "Where is the justice?" we asked. By phrasing the question this way, we positioned it as moral issue. And, yes, the ...
December 05, 2014
This is predictable. EU officials are now stating they are going to do what they want to do whether or not the EU agreements allow it. We've mentioned it numerous times because onetime EU top man Romano Prodi is on record as suggesting that this would happen so ...
December 05, 2014
Reading about Orwell in The Economist magazine is a bit like reading about a celebration of the Internet in China. You can expect that a lot has been left out. Defending its lack of substance, the article retreats into the kind of archly intellectual tone that ...
December 04, 2014
Elite memes have two sides and we can see this when it comes to the stock market. On the one hand, there are plenty of articles in the mainstream media indicating that the current "rally" could go on indefinitely. And then there are articles like this that prov ...
December 04, 2014
Scientific American often provides us with memes we recognize, especially when it comes to global warming. Another theme is the virtue of government science. For the editors at Scientific American, there can be almost no significant breakthroughs without govern ...
December 03, 2014
What's funny about this Bloomberg editorial is that it criticizes gold purchasers for following "stories" but somehow neglects to explain that those who purchase stocks, bonds, commodities and real estate are also following certain narratives. To put it another ...
December 03, 2014
Yesterday came word that Britain was banning the filming of numerous kinds of "violent" sexual acts including spanking. We're not going into the specifics of what was "banned" because it really doesn't matter. What does matter is that elites, specifically Briti ...
December 02, 2014
Rand Paul is back in the news with statements about the war on drugs creating a "culture of violence" that puts police into an impossible situation. In the same editorial, he also said the criminal justice system targets more blacks than whites but that nonethe ...
December 02, 2014
It didn't take that long for the mainstream media to start debunking an increasingly favorite libertarian report regarding the "First Thanksgiving." We recently presented the libertaraian narrative here at The Daily Bell in a scholarly retelling by Richard Ebel ...
December 01, 2014
This Reuters article states clearly what we've been pointed out in our Wall Street Party meme: It's not just a US phenomenon. We noted this as quantitative easing began several years ago in the US. The EU, too, was stimulating European economies at the time as ...
December 01, 2014
The numbers were more skewed than we expected, but the anti-gold vote was not a surprise. For a variety of reasons, the Swiss don't seem to seek a return to a quasi-gold standard. There are, of course, various speculations regarding this vote. Some believe, as ...
