This past week the administration announced its choice for the first credit czar at the new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. This bureau was created as part of the supposed Wall Street reform bill recently passed by Congress. This new bureau, whic...
At times I have the impression that maybe there are practicing political allies out there somewhere, ones who are involved with current affairs, and at times it looks like these would be Republicans and especially conservative ones. That's because ...
The power elite used to move along the waters of the world like a majestic supertanker with plenty of time to take evasive action when an obstacle was sighted. These days it races along like nuclear-powered destroyer. An additional dominant social them...
We've watched the Michael Vick story unfold with some fascination. It tends to confirm what we think about sports reporters in general, that they exaggerate every single wrongheaded characteristic of mainstream reporters. This stands to reason afte...
Savvy investors – having realized that the stock market is not necessarily the way to generate terrific riches – are going back to the land. The dominant social theme might be, "Who can trust these paper products? Give us tangible, pro...
The UK Telegraph remains a mainstream anomaly; articles by Ambrose Evans-Pritchard often do not buttress the dominant social themes that the power elite is trying to promote. On the other hand, Evans-Pritchard is no free-market monetarist. He seems to ...
Is it jaw-jaw rather than war-war with Iran? Portions of the US military industrial complex obviously want war-war, but the pushback from other US military, intelligence and civilian sectors seem to mitigate against it. We remember when it seemed certa...
Some have been demeaning the right to private property - which is very closely linked to America's political tradition and if sufficiently discredited would also help destroy the country - because such a right is supposedly created by a legal syste...
As a loyal though reluctant reader of The New York Review of Books – too masochistic an experience at times but in my line of work unavoidable – I have read a lot of essays by the recently deceased public intellectual and NYU professor Tony...
The Gold Council research makes the point that "The gold price is consistent with its long-run average level compared with a range of different assets, including equity indices and hard assets like oil." Or to put it another way, there is a n...