Shrink the State. End the Fed. Balance the budget. Make a profit. Leave an inheritance.
Gary North
Written by Gary North on November 15, 2011
I was Ron Paul’s staff economist in the second half of 1976. That was his first, brief term in office. He lost by 268 votes out of over 180,000 in November. That ended my career in Washington. What was it like to be on his staff? What was it like to be in Washington in […]
Continue reading →Written by Gary North on November 15, 2011
Hyperinflation is triple-digit annual price inflation. I think it’s anything above 25%. Mass inflation is anything above 15% but below 25%. We are going to get mass inflation. We are not going to get hyperinflation. Why am I so “optimistic”? Because I see that the Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke is now caught in a […]
Continue reading →Written by Gary North on November 15, 2011
These are the Big Four. I first wrote about this in 1980. Most of the time, we muddle through. We bump along. But a wise person has reserves. I mean reserves in the broadest sense. Faith in God is more reliable than faith in gold. As for groceries, they are cheap, especially for wise shoppers […]
Continue reading →Written by Gary North on November 15, 2011
The official New World Order party line in Europe is this: (1) the euro will survive; (2) the eurozone will prosper; (3) the European Union is forever. None of this is true. When Greece defaults and leaves the eurozone — or is booted out — the experiment will unravel. This was the grand experiment of […]
Continue reading →Written by Gary North on November 15, 2011
The National Federation of Independent Business reports on business sentiment. It is bad. With 1986 as 100, October’s sentiment was 90.2. In January 2009, almost three years ago, it was 89.1. That was in the recession. This recovery is the weakest in post-Word War II history. Sentiment is a little better than in August, but […]
Continue reading →Written by Gary North on November 15, 2011
If you think of the European debt crisis in terms of taverns (banks), drunks (governments), and a distillery (the European Central Bank), you will begin to understand the reasons why it is getting worse. The governments are like drunks who have run up large tabs as the local tavern. Some drunks have huge tabs: the […]
Continue reading →Written by Gary North on November 14, 2011
In the good old days, when I was a teenager, college was the way to job security. But, with each new batch of graduates, the value of a degree in the liberal arts goes down. Graduates compete against each other. The main source of job growth is new businesses: 5 years or newer. These are […]
Continue reading →Written by Gary North on November 14, 2011
Inventories of existing homes fell 16% over the last 12 months. This means that the number of sellers of homes competing with each other has fallen. This points to stabilization of prices. Problem: this does not count “shadow inventory”: repossessed homes, abandoned homes, and other non-traditional sources of housing. But this does point to some […]
Continue reading →Written by Gary North on November 14, 2011
People who buy gold worry because they think the government may confiscate their gold. There are reasons — a lot of reasons — to think that this fear is way overblown. For one thing, gold has no monetary function in the modern economy, except for central banks. It is not 1933, when American used gold […]
Continue reading →Written by Gary North on November 14, 2011
Is peak oil real? Of course. It is running out: a billion barrels every two weeks. It is not being made. The price will go higher. But this does not mean the end of the world. At some price — much higher — there will be alternatives. One of them is natural gas. Its use […]
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