Shrink the State. End the Fed. Balance the budget. Make a profit. Leave an inheritance.
Gary North
Written by Gary North on November 21, 2011
The bankruptcy if MF Global is creating ripples. The outfit was high leveraged, using commoidity futures. The managers used customers’ money — cash basis, no debt — to cover losses in its own speculations. The customers cannot get their money back. They must wait. They may suffer 50% losses. Always before, the clearing house assured […]
Continue reading →Written by Gary North on November 21, 2011
The Sunday morning news show, “Face the Nation,” advertised an interview with Ron Paul. Paul is in a statistical tie in Iowa with Cain, Gingrich, and Romney. So, he is news. But he was not news enough. Halfway through the interview, Bob Schieffer cut him off. You can hear Paul try to say something, but […]
Continue reading →Written by Gary North on November 18, 2011
North’s law of bureaucracy is simple to state: “Eventually, some bureaucrat will follow the rules exactly and do something incomparably silly.” A fine example of this law is a regulation from the European Union’s bureaucrats that sellers of bottled water are not allowed to claim that their products, made of 100% water, reduce dehydration. De-hydration […]
Continue reading →Written by Gary North on November 18, 2011
I prefer to use the Median Consumer Price Index to the regular CPI. In October, prices rose 0.2%. They have been in this range for months. The more common index, the CPI, reveals a comparable low rate. As I have been saying for two years, price inflation is low because banks have stashed $1.6 trillion […]
Continue reading →Written by Gary North on November 18, 2011
Agela Merkel is an internationalist. She plays a political game. She says firmly in public that there must be no more bailouts, that the European Central Bank must not inflate. Then she goes behind the scenes and agrees with whatever the ECB wants to do. She is now saying that it is time for nations […]
Continue reading →Written by Gary North on November 18, 2011
I plan to do this. It’s in a nice neighborhood in a bedroom community 40 minutes from Atlanta. It’s a foreclosure. But aren’t housing prices likely to fall? Yes. The latest data indicate that foreclosures rose by 14% between the second quarter and the third. This indicates that the inventory of unsold homes is rising. […]
Continue reading →Written by Gary North on November 18, 2011
China’s economic growth is fake. The economy is not growing at 9% per year. It is contracting by 10%. So said a prominent Hong Kong economist in a lecture he did not know was being recorded. (Guys, it’s a cell phone world!) The growth figures are fake. They are being pumped up by government spending […]
Continue reading →Written by Gary North on November 18, 2011
The on-budget debt of the United States government breached the $15 trillion mark this week. This is the debt that is counted. It does not include the unfunded liabilities of Social Security and Medicare, which are now in the $100 trillion range over 75 years. Some estimates are higher. More important is the sources of […]
Continue reading →Written by Gary North on November 18, 2011
The only institution with enough money to bail out the PIIGS is the European Central Bank. The threat of a domino effect is increasing. By treaty, the ECB is not allowed to buy the debt of governments. It gets around this by lending to banks that buy government debt. But the bankers are beginning to […]
Continue reading →Written by Gary North on November 18, 2011
“System D” is the new term for black markets. Black markets around the world are growing. The estimate is that it accounts for $10 trillion worth of production. I think this is a low-ball estimate. System D accounts for far more. The heart of these markets is secrecy. If you think you can measure it, […]
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