STAFF NEWS & ANALYSIS
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April 12, 2013
People don't seem to realize that a Greek-style austerity is being imposed on the US. It is actually an International Monetary Fund oriented solution. Taxes and regulations increase and public benefits go down. The only part not being applied currently is a mas ...
April 12, 2013
We are not surprised that China imported more than it exported in March. The idea that has gained in currency in China is that since the West can no longer be an engine of consumerism, China will have to turn its own citizens into consumers. We were always doub ...
April 12, 2013
Globalists hate gold. Those who want to expand internationalism find it much more convenient to do so via fiat money than in any other way. Central bank fiat-money expansions drive internationalism in much the same way as global trade agreements. These are the ...
April 12, 2013
The Guardian is probably correct in its analysis that Margaret Thatcher's free-market policies made Britain a less fair and socially equitable place to live. But that is only because Thatcher's policies neglected to reform the most heinous part of Britain's eco ...
April 11, 2013
Is it really getting better? And how long can top EU officials keep warning people about Eurozone instability? Now it appears that France is being drawn into the mess that is the European currency crisis. This has all been predicted, by the way, just not by Eur ...
April 11, 2013
Ashley Mote is a convicted felon, but also a prolific freedom-author, and he seems to have written an interesting book. The book is based on his experiences from 2004 to 2009 as an independent member of the European Parliament. Once in Brussels, Ashley Mote des ...
April 11, 2013
This Reuters editorial brings up two points and provides us with two separate conclusions. Theoretically, we are much averse to the argument that government needs to provide minimum wages. But practically speaking, if government is going to provide money to imp ...
April 11, 2013
What the hell is happening at Bloomberg? How did an article like THIS ever get published by that august purveyor of statism, rational planning and "experts"? Actually, we do know why. Authors in the modeling camp only write articles like this very rarely – wh ...
April 10, 2013
The Kohl administration actually donated funds to French politicians to influence French domestic opinion. And now it turns out that Kohl himself confesses he "acted like a dictator" to ensure that Germany adopted the euro. Kohl explains that he acted like a di ...
April 10, 2013
In an article yesterday we suggested that the reason Japan was embarking on a massive attempt at Keynesian-style stimulation was to promote the efficacy of Keynesian economic "cures." But there is another possibility as well. Perhaps the idea is to start a curr ...
April 10, 2013
This Economist article actually maintains that the Federal Reserve is doing a better job of making a US recovery happen than the ECB. Economist writers and editors ought to visit the United States to see how the recovery is actually going. Many parts of the Uni ...
April 10, 2013
Are we really supposed to believe that only large statist institutions can provide economic stability? That's what this article argues, anyway. It is curious that it appears at a time when the US government is trying to dismantle its biggest banks, with legisla ...
April 10, 2013
Free-Market Analysis: We think we can recognize a dominant social theme when we see one. This sudden emphasis on eradicating tax havens is just such a theme. It is a manufactured media firestorm, intended to go on and on until there are few places to hide money ...
April 09, 2013
Sir Harold Evans is married to Tina Brown, one of our bête noirs ... a fabulously talented writer who long ago turned into a gunslinger for British imperial interests and globalism generally. Brown, editor these days of the Daily Beast and the just-folded prin ...
April 09, 2013
The Economist magazine's reporting is often fantastical. It treats countries as if they were people and politicians as if they were important. This "analysis" of Kenya's elections is a good example. There is no reason for Kenya to exist. It is a conglomeration ...
April 09, 2013
Free-Market Analysis: On the heels of the Cyprus offshore banking bustup comes this vast "investigation" of offshore individuals and corporations. It surely constitutes a questionable episode in Western reporting in the 21st century. The classical purpose of We ...
April 09, 2013
We wrote about this recently but wanted to return to the topic because it is turning into some sort of litmus test for Keynesianism itself. Keynesianism (really neo-Keynesianism) thankfully is on the proverbial ropes these days, having shown nowhere in the civi ...
April 08, 2013
This is the fundamental fault line between freedom and statism and one reason we've spent so much time writing about it and have been subject to so many attacks. The meme – and we early recognized it as such – that money is a state-sponsored occurrence can ...
April 08, 2013
Time magazine asks whether globalism is falling apart but the article is really just another excuse to rebut Stockman's book. We've already covered the controversy over David Stockman's new book that provides what is basically an Austrian analysis of today's sp ...
April 08, 2013
We wrote about this Saturday in an editorial but want to return to this topic today – and this Washington Post article gives us the opportunity to do so. Our contention is that what is seemingly a coordinated attack on the offshore industry is no coincidence. ...
April 08, 2013
Vox posted this long and scholarly article that calls for more EU centralization. You would think since the current level of centralization has worked so badly that its proponents would be searching for other answers. Not a chance. As we have pointed out numero ...
April 08, 2013
This rebuttal to DeGraw's book is not entirely timely, as the book in question was actually posted and printed (we assume) quite a while ago. We didn't properly double-check the date and thought it to be new (an odd assumption since we previously responded in m ...
April 05, 2013
Steven Horwitz, once interviewed by the Daily Bell, has written an article in US News (see above) on ending the Federal Reserve. Horwitz is a Mercatus Center Affiliated Senior Scholar and the Charles A. Dana Professor of Economics and department chair at St. La ...
April 05, 2013
Here's a modest proposal: Let's wipe out the national debt. Much of the West's national debt is owed to various central banks. Columbia Professor Michael Woodford, called "the world's most closely followed monetary theorist," in this article says it ought to be ...
April 05, 2013
This is a fun article/interview to analyze because unlike Greenbackerism it doesn't aspire to any kind of faux-sophistication about finance or maliciously distort the truth to mislead people. It studiously avoids reality, but that's not quite the same thing ... ...
April 05, 2013
But a degree is NOT ... not anymore. With Western economies in collapse, it is probably wiser to gain a trade than a degree. People who realize this are sensible and tending to their futures in a manageable way. Formal education at its higher levels is lifted f ...
April 04, 2013
No ... the greatest of all modern, libertarian thinkers, Ludwig von Mises, has won. The reputation of sycophantic socialist John Maynard Keynes lies in ruins (among those who understand, anyway) and the long debate that began back in the 1930s is likely settled ...
April 04, 2013
The book excerpt by David Stockman that appeared recently in the New York Times (entitled "The Great Deformation") has badly rocked the chattering classes (see other article this issue). Their arguments are being deployed now in a concerted counterattack that s ...
April 04, 2013
The New American has done us the favor of pointing out the particulars of the BRICs' recent announcement regarding the formation of a developing world version of the International Monetary Fund. It turns out in almost every way that the BRICs agenda is an inter ...
April 04, 2013
Gradually, the nonsense about North and South Europe will fall away. It is true the cultures are different and no one would accuse Greeks, in aggregate, as valuing the kind of efficiencies and detailed order apparently dear to many German hearts (or so we are t ...
April 04, 2013
Almost every week in the European – British – press we are treated to yet another optimistic forecast about Britain's economic condition. And yet it keeps deteriorating. This admission by government officials about the reality of the British fiscal conditio ...
April 04, 2013
It's happening again ... In the late 1990s, credit was screwed down in the US, creating in the tech bubble and bust. In the early 2000s, the Fed kept rates so low that some homebuyers actually received offers of remuneration were they to take advantage of credi ...
April 04, 2013
We must make a confession: We didn't read David Stockman's article in the New York Times until recently ... but, boy, we sure should have! This video, which is a response to Stockman's screed, is probably the most inchoate and disorganized single presentation w ...
April 03, 2013
In our continued effort to explain why the shift from East to West is not entirely coincidental, we bring you this report from Der Spiegel. It continues, generally, with the dominant social theme (already identified in these pages) of Asian might, and in partic ...
April 03, 2013
Around the world, Western-style monetary recipes are failing. But this article attempts to convince us that the Chinese have somehow managed to implement miraculous growth using ingredients that are notably dysfunctional elsewhere. How is that possible? We woul ...
April 03, 2013
We used a provocative headline (above) to remind readers that when central bankers promise to "stimulate" they are really talking about printing more money that inflates the money supply and causes, eventually, price inflation. This is what Japan's newly electe ...
April 03, 2013
Another day, another jeremiad from The Atlantic (which used to be a respectable thought publication) on the efficacy of political activism in the economic arena. It is truly tiresome after a while and, yes, it is easy to shoot down the idea of a state-controlle ...
April 02, 2013
We've posted several articles now attempting to explain that the East versus West monetary competition is a kind of dominant social theme that doesn't reveal the reality of what's going on. But it is a meme, nonetheless, that is being ladled thick and fast. Fir ...
April 02, 2013
We've often pointed out that current economics involves transmitting electronic digits from central banks to money center (distributive) banks that then lend out the money or not as they choose. There is really no difference between putting this money in banks ...
April 02, 2013
Another day, another fulsome narrative about how paunchy middle-aged men (and some plump or fashionably emaciated women) save the world. The only trouble with these endless books is that there are so many crises because the same superheroes we learn are saving ...
April 02, 2013
This editorial makes the case that the US government is propping up Wall Street products and production and needs to stop it. The free market and risk taking needs to return to the larger securities industry. When government makes risky activity profitable then ...
April 02, 2013
You can only shake your head. There are so many people who believe that more government is the answer or that "markets fail." Of course it is impossible for a market to fail. The worst that can happen is that the market price is not sufficiently accurate from a ...
April 02, 2013
The Telegraph tells us the story of Kathryn Bolkovac, who went to Bosnia and discovered that UN officials and supporters were apparently involved in sex trafficking or at least covering it up. This is an important story that has now been made into a film. Were ...
April 02, 2013
We've written about this dominant social theme before but because of this article we can't resist returning to it. Everything we wrote about it is right here in black and white. We should also note that while this article was written a week ago when Cyprus was ...
April 02, 2013
When large democracies create state mandates they will inevitably be exploited. Now it appears that nearly a million in Britain were taking advantage of sickness-related benefits that they were not eligible for. This figure is arrived at via reports that 878,30 ...
April 01, 2013
We've already written about this dominant social theme. We are supposed to believe the Western world is moving away from the dollar and that Australia is fundamentally breaking away from Britain and welcoming the embrace of China? Last week came news that the B ...
April 01, 2013
This article actually appeared about six months ago but is worth examining within the parameters of Western decline given that we are documenting the shrinkage of the US dollar economy, the rise of an alternative, BRIC-based International Monetary Fund, etc. (S ...
April 01, 2013
This is a very revealing article posted at Reuters that comes out flatly and says the Cyprus crisis was overblown on purpose because otherwise sufficient pressure could not have been generated by the world community to change Cyprus's behavior. Yet the campaign ...
April 01, 2013
This article posted at CNBC basically acknowledges that an important issue surrounding the Cyprus issue is Cyprus' status as a tax haven and that others are now vying to replace Cyprus. If indeed Brussels attacked Cyprus over its accommodation of those seeking ...
March 29, 2013
According to the Washington Post, there is a growing consensus for shutting off the Federal Reserve's monetary stimulus plan – see above – that is based on two reasons. Either it has succeeded brilliantly or it has introduced macro-economic risks that have ...
