Shrink the State. End the Fed. Balance the budget. Make a profit. Leave an inheritance.
Gary North
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Oil prices are up. Gasoline prices are up. Don’t blame Obama. Blame Asia. Asia now accounts for at least 30% of world demand for oil. This is going to increase. Now this rising demand is forcing Westerners to dig deeper into their wallets. As Asia gets richer, Asians buy more cars. They build more factories. [...]
Continue reading →The sign of the slowdown in China is the fact that rents in Honk Kong are falling. Rentals there have been from $10,000 to $23,000 a month. They were off almost 20% in 2011. The high-end rentals are falling faster. The market for rents in the range of US$25,000 to US$32,000 has been particularly hard [...]
Continue reading →China’s imports are slowing. This indicates that economic growth is slowing rapidly. Imports are at their lowest in two years. Bank lending is also slowing. Because banking is run by the government, this could reverse if the national politicians decide to inflate. It has begun to do this, but not aggressively. “I think that liquidity [...]
Continue reading →China is importing a lot of gold. Yet China is a gold-producing nation. This indicates a large demand. Imports in November rose by over 102 kilograms. This was up from 86,000 in October. They bought it from Hong Kong. Hong Kong reported this. China doesn’t. China bought as much as 490 tons in 2011. It [...]
Continue reading →The Establishment media insist that peak oil theory is a myth. This is why the following chart is not mentioned in the Establishment media. It tracks oil production. It is flat. This is global annual crude oil production in millions of barrels per day. Here is the problem the West faces. We know that Asia [...]
Continue reading →Gold in late December was under $1540. Today, it is $200 higher. What happened? A Forbes colmnist offers suggestions. First, gold is not like other commodities. It is an alternative currency. The European crisis is accelerating. Second, hedge funds had to sell to redeem shares. Third, low interest rates help to keep ownership cheap. Alternative [...]
Continue reading →On the CBS TV news program, Sunday Morning, the cover story was a hatchet job on Apple. It exposed a Chinese firm that supplies with some of their products. The company’s plant is huge: over 400,000 workers. Most workers that we could see were young: twenty-somethings. They were all dressed in Western clothes: T-shirts, jeans. [...]
Continue reading →Patrick Bond gave an important speech on January 10. He is Australia. Australia is tied closely to China’s economy. Bond took part in an 11-day study tour to south and central China in December. He uses the language of the old Marxism. He and his colleagues lost the ideological war, beginning in China in 1978, [...]
Continue reading →China is the fastest growing large economy in history. One man’s decision did this: Deng Xioping’s decision to free up agriculture in 1978. But how did he know this would work? Because there was a test case — a kind of social laboratory. The farmers in a small village decided to secretly abandon Communism and [...]
Continue reading →When a dictator dies, this is for liberty. Liberty is good for free markets. Free markets are good for stocks. Yet stocks fall when a dictator dies. Kim Jong-il has died at age 69. He was the next-to-last Communist. Only the Castro bothers remain. His son is an unknown. Whether he can hold onto power [...]
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