Shrink the State. End the Fed. Balance the budget. Make a profit. Leave an inheritance.
Gary North
Detroit is bankrupt. Everyone knows this. Everyone has known it for months. It is not official, but it’s close. The pension holders are going to see their dreams blown to dust. They are the cause. They will be the solution. The state has sent in The Terminator. He can shut the city down. He can [...]
Continue reading →Average student debt for college is now $26,500. That is up 5% from last year. As with almost everything else in life, Pareto’s 20-80 rule governs student debt. About 20% of students with debt carry 80% of this debt. Median debt is half this: about $13,600. Half owe more; half owe less. What the stories [...]
Continue reading →American consumers in March decided to slow their rate of borrowing on their credit cards. This caught economists by surprise. In February, they borrowed $18.6 billion. That looked as though the recovery was taking hold. But in March, they hit the brakes: $7.97 billion. “Estimates of the 31 economists surveyed by Bloomberg ranged from gains [...]
Continue reading →Latest reports indicate that foreigners hold 52% of marketable U.S. Treasury debt. Most of this is held by foreign central banks. Treasuries pay almost no interest. But foreign central banks have plenty of money. They create it out of nothing. Then they buy U.S. Treasury debt. Because of this, the U.S. dollar is the world’s [...]
Continue reading →The recession in Europe has spread into every large nation. Still, price are rising. The European Central Bank is powerless. It has officially set lending rates at 0.75%. Still, the economies are crashing. Greece has a 27% unemployment rate. So does Spain. Now there is talk of a rate cut by the ECB. To which [...]
Continue reading →The best-selling book, This Time It’s Different (2010) , which warned against a high government debt-to-GDP ratio, relied on an Excel spreadsheet. Problem: one of the cells was wrong. An article exposing this error has gotten a lot of coverage in the media. Liberals have cheered. At last, relief! They can still remain in the [...]
Continue reading →Latest report: foreign holdings of U.S. government debt are up by 10%, year over year. China has been buying. It now holds $1.2 trillion. The total comes to $5.66 trillion. Of this, 72% is held by foreign governments and central banks. This policy of inflating the domestic currency and buying U.S. Treasury debt with the [...]
Continue reading →Three factors have made possible the modern world’s wars: graduated taxation, the central bank, and the abolition of the gold coin standard. The relationship between central banking and war has been known for at least 400 years. The ability of the Dutch Republic to wage what was in effect a revolutionary war against the Spanish [...]
Continue reading →The City of Stockton has officially gone bankrupt. But it is still paying pensions. The other creditors are complaining. What entitles pensioners to get paid, when no one else is getting paid? The judge overruled them. But if Stockton gets away with this, the California pension system will be in trouble. Cities will stop contributing [...]
Continue reading →The latest country to invoke panic spending is South Korea. Its economy is faltering. What is needed? A bigger deficit, of course. Then what? More central bank inflation. The central bank is expected to cut interest rates on short-term government bonds next month. All over the world, East and West, the politicians are desperate. So [...]
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