Author: Gary North

China, meaning China’s central bank — the People’s Bank of China — started buying Treasury IOU’s again in March. It purchased $36 billion worth. It now holds over $1.2 trillion in Treasury IOU’s. China has now leaped ahead of Japan as the #1 foreign holder of U.S. government debt. Add Hong Kong to this: another $180 billion. The statistics are here. A few mid-level PBOC officials have talked tough for two years. “We’re through with the U.S. dollar!” Great rhetoric. But when push came to shove, the government buckled. So did the People’s Bank of China. The PBOC buys dollars … Continue reading →

Men lose their hearing faster than women do. Here is the evidence. I wanted to test my hearing. I looked for online testing sites. I found three good ones. http://www.garynorth.com/snip/1177.htm http://www.garynorth.com/snip/1178.htm http://www.garynorth.com/snip/1179.htm I used a pair of high quality headphones: Denon. These tests involve background noise to cover words or numbers. This way, you get something like a real-world situation, not just a series of tones at various frequencies. Also, these tests have you set volume on-screen, not with your pre-amp. Each site’s software controls for volume to achieve greater consistency. The good news: I passed all three.

It’s always nice to see a leftist outfit finally fess up to a lost cause. The global warming crowd has clearly lost, and this Mother Jones article makes this clear. The governments of the world have not implemented the Kyoto treaty of 1992 or its 1997 update. The whole thing lapsed on December 31, 2012. It’s over. Kaput. Think of it as Al Gore’s presidential campaign. Clinton never submitted it to the Senate. Neither did Obama. It was allowed to die of old age. In the latest article, we see that the far, far radicals of the global warming agenda … Continue reading →

On December 16, 2014, I published an article for paid members of my GaryNorth.com site: “Saudi Arabia’s Oil Strategy.” I wrote the following about West Texas intermediate crude oil prices: WTI oil hit $37.51 in February 2009. This was in the midst of a major recession. It was back to $80 by late December. I do not see a crash coming next year. The economy worldwide is not strong, but this is not 2008. If WTI gets to $45, it will be a buying opportunity for energy stocks. My guess is that a $75 to $80 price in a year … Continue reading →

Guy Carawan died on May 2. He was 87. Sadly, he was suffering from dementia, that terrible disease. Carawan introduced We Shall Overcome to the civil rights movement in the spring of 1960. It had been picked up by the union movement in the late 1940’s. Pete Seeger was one of the early popularizers of the song, but Carawan made it famous. Thinking back today, the song has survived. The trade union movement is pretty much moribund in the United States, and the civil rights movement has evolved into something very different from what it was in the South in … Continue reading →

Stevenson College is part of the University of California, Santa Cruz. UC Santa Cruz has the reputation of being the most far-Left tax-supported university in the United States. On the faculty are Angela Davis and Bettina Aptheker, both of whom were openly Communists in the 1960’s. They have, of course, mellowed. That’s what happens when you bet heavily on the wrong horse, which drops dead in the final stretch. The students accused the school of being insensitive — that beloved catch phrase of the Left whenever “fascist” is just not plausible — because it served tacos and re-fried beans just … Continue reading →

And he will take the tenth of your seed, and of your vineyards, and give to his officers, and to his servants. And he will take your menservants, and your maidservants, and your goodliest young men, and your asses, and put them to his work. He will take the tenth of your sheep: and ye shall be his servants. And ye shall cry out in that day because of your king which ye shall have chosen you; and the Lord will not hear you in that day. (I Samuel 8:15-18). Te people of Israel wanted a king. They heard of … Continue reading →

A year after the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) scuttled plans to build its own nationwide database of vehicle license plate data, tA+he agency is seeking bids from private contractors to provide the agency access to the same information. DHS canceled last year’s plan in the wake of TSA domestic spying revelations and subsequent outrage over increasingly intrusive government surveillance. At the time, we predicted DHS would find another way to track every single car on the road, likely by relying on the services of private companies like Vigilant Solutions, one of the largest aggregators and purveyors of license-plate data. Companies … Continue reading →

The New York Times, along with all other print-based city newspapers, is slowly going bankrupt. Specifically, Craigslist is killing them. Generally, the Web is killing them. They are all doomed. There are no exceptions. They are like mastodons caught in the tar pit. Some of them are sinking faster than others, but all of them are sinking. What is killing them is the loss of advertising revenue in print editions. That is where the money is. That is where the money has always been. To make profits, they have to sell ad space on large pieces of paper — newsprint. … Continue reading →

Federal tax receipts are approaching 17.5% of GDP. Whenever the percentage gets this high, a recession follows. That’s the bad news. What’s the good news? The percentage rarely gets above this, and when it does, there is a recession. Receipts fall. This means that the federal government cannot get above 20%. It can borrow to get spending above 20%, and it is doing this. But federal tax receipts have a ceiling in the United States. We are close to that ceiling. This is a major restraining factor on the federal government. McLellan has provided two informative charts. I regard these … Continue reading →

Pay attention. In recent months, the U.S. stock market has gone nowhere: up, down, up, down. No pattern. Yesterday, the world’s stock markets tanked. No warning. Wham! No single central bank is responsible. No single central bank can goose the world’s stock markets. No coordinated policy is likely . . . yet. There is no sell-off panic . . . yet. This was “a warning shot fired across the bow.” This has the look of a market top. One day’s stick market action rarely calls attention to itself. This one is not comparable to the 22% worldwide one-day collapse in … Continue reading →

Forty-five years ago today, the Left celebrated their first Earth Day. Nothing has come of it. But they still celebrate it. They take their anniversaries seriously. Lest we forget, this is how it happened. Earth Day is an annual event, celebrated on April 22, on which day events worldwide are held to demonstrate support for environmental protection. It was first celebrated in 1970, and is now coordinated globally by the Earth Day Network, and celebrated in more than 192 countries each year.In 1969 at a UNESCO Conference in San Francisco, peace activist John McConnell proposed a day to honor the … Continue reading →

The world’s central banks have a problem. When economic conditions worsen, they react by reducing interest rates in order to stimulate the economy. But, as has happened across the world in recent years, there comes a point where those central banks run out of room to cut — they can bring interest rates to zero, but reducing them further below that is fraught with problems, the biggest of which is cash in the economy. In a new piece, Citi’s Willem Buiter looks at this problem, which is known as the effective lower bound (ELB) on nominal interest rates. Fundamentally, the … Continue reading →

The systematic murder of 1.5 million Armenians by the Turks, which began a century ago, will be memorialized around the world on April 24. The Pope got things rolling early this week by meeting with Armenian religious leaders at the Vatican. He called for international recognition of the historical truth of this genocide. He said this to the visiting leaders. “A century has passed since that horrific massacre which was a true martyrdom of your people, in which many innocent people died as confessors and martyrs for the name of Christ. Even today, there is not an Armenian family untouched … Continue reading →

If fire break out, and catch in thorns, so that the stacks of corn, or the standing corn, or the field, be consumed therewith; he that kindled the fire shall surely make restitution (Exodus 22:6). This passage has to do with legal liability. If somebody sets a fire on his own property, and this fire spreads to his neighbor’s property, the man who set the fire is legally responsible. He has to make restitution to his victim. This is a case of accidental damage. How much greater the liability when the damage is deliberate? The Bible makes it clear that … Continue reading →