Another day, another dry and witty Economist magazine article advising another large country on what its central bankers need to do. There is never any doubt within The Economist brain-trust that central banking is a necessary phenomenon, or that it me...
There are other metrics beside the gold basis that the market has developed in the meantime. One such is GOFO = $ LIBOR – GLR (the gold lease rate). On the face of it, GOFO cannot ever go negative. If it did, it would mean that the risk i...
Bet you didn't know that Britain was suffering from high inflation. We didn't anyway and we try to keep on top of these things. We knew that Britain was suffering from a high jobless rate. And we knew that Britain's debts were out of contro...
Editors Note: Many Americans were appalled on May 20, 2010 when Mexican President Felipe Calderon speaking before a joint session of Congress proceeded to lecture the United States critizing our immigration policy and specifically attacking Arizona’s...
The president of the AAUP - American Association of University Professors - issued a lengthy declaration warning the membership against getting involved with BP, the giant oil company whose operations have gone awry in the Gulf of Mexico and whose mana...
The Telegraph has been very good at diagnosing deflationary trends in the larger economy, and we have agreed with this analysis because it seems obvious. What is noteworthy, however, is that prices keep going down, as the Telegraph analyzes above, even...
There is now a robust political constituency supporting the generous tax treatment given to IRAs. One element is the 40 million people who have an IRA. A second element is the retail financial industry – banks, brokerage houses, mutual funds and ...
We, who were raised in pre-nihilist America, find most of today's movies, TV programs and literary works hideous and depressing. We cringe at the obsessive sexuality of Hollywood's cinematic pretensions, at its love affair with anti-heroes, and...
Recently the Washington Post ran an extensive report by Dana Priest and William M. Arkin on the bloated intelligence community. They found that an estimated 854,000 people hold top-secret security clearances. Just what are all these people up to? By my...
Yesterday, we surmise, was one long headache for those in charge of the Afghanistan war on the Western side. Metaphorically, many good officers in the Pentagon and elsewhere stood in the middle of otherwise efficient offices holding their collective he...