Category Archives: History

This article appeared online at TheNewAmerican.com on Wednesday, November 21, 2018: 

It was Jeremy Siegel, professor of finance at the Wharton School of Business and the seer who predicted that the Dow Jones Industrial Average would see 20,000 by the end of 2015, who got it right. The stock market’s recent fall, losing 1,000 points in two days earlier this week and almost 2,500 points since early October, was caused by Jerome Powell, the head of the Federal Reserve. During an interview on CNBC’s Closing Bell on Tuesday, Siegel said, “The market is saying that the pace [of the Fed’s interest rate hikes] is a little too fast.… The market is clearly worried about over-tightening [by] the Fed.”

The decline can be traced to remarks by Powell in early October that the Fed was

This article appeared online at TheNewAmerican.com on Monday, November 19, 2018:  

As far as one can tell, Charles Evans, the president of the Chicago Federal Reserve Bank who also sits on the Fed’s policymaking body the FOMC (Federal Open Market Committee), never in his life swung a hammer, put on a tool belt, or had to meet a payroll. But when it comes to interest rates and their impact on the housing market, he has an opinion: interest rates are too low and should go higher, perhaps much higher. And soon. He “penciled in” possibly four more interest rate hikes next year.

But he’s not really sure what that means.

This article was published by The McAlvany Intelligence Advisor on Friday, November 15, 2018:

This writer opined in this space [at The McAlvany Intelligence Advisor] on Wednesday that, due to certain technical and political indicators, this would be an opportune time for hard money advocates to open or add to their holdings of precious metals. That same day, the U.S. Treasury issued its own fundamental “buy” signal. In its monthly statement of receipts and outlays of the U.S. government, it noted that although receipts jumped more than seven percent in October, year-over-year, government spending rose a breathtaking 18 percent compared to October a year ago.

Buried in the various charts and graphs was this note:

This article was published by The McAlvany Intelligence Advisor on Wednesday, November 14, 2018:

With gold closing at $1,202 an ounce and silver closing below $14 an ounce on Tuesday, safe haven hard money investors have the third opportunity in three years to take advantage of such prices.

In November 2015, gold bottomed at $1,081 an ounce; in December 2016 it found support at $1,169 an ounce, and on Tuesday it dropped $1.50 from Monday’s close to finish at exactly $1,202.

Three separate studies have shown the connection between monetary uncertainty and the behavior of precious metals prices. The first, completed by Jonathan Batten, Cetin Ciner and Brian Lucey, concluded that

This article appeared online at TheNewAmerican.com on Tuesday, October 30, 2018:  

The national debt of the United States government jumped by $1.3 trillion during the fiscal year ending September 30. The gap between the government’s spending and its income for that fiscal year was $779 billion, a jump of $113 billion over the year before. And now, the U.S. Treasury has announced how it’s going to manage all this: It’s going to issue new debt in the amount of $1.34 trillion, a 146 percent increase from 2017 and the highest amount of new debt issued since 2010.

Said the Treasury:

This article was published by The McAlvany Intelligence Advisor on Friday, October 26, 2018: 

Most people think of the Fed as an indispensable institution without which the country’s economy could not properly function. What most people don’t realize is that the Fed – created by the Morgans and the Rockefellers at a private club off the coast of Georgia – is actually working against their own personal interests.

Want proof? Try the multiple selloffs on Wall Street since the beginning of October. Some people blame them on October. After all, it’s the month when sell-offs happen. It’s in the tides. It’s in the moon’s cycles. It’s a spooky month. Etc., etc.

Others, looking slightly deeper at possible causes, blame them on trade “disputes,” China’s intransigence, the murder in Saudi Arabia, the rise in oil and gas prices, the “caravan” of dissidents headed for the U.S.’s southern border, the rash of fake bomb attacks, fill in the blank.

They came closer to the truth when they considered

This article appeared online at TheNewAmerican.com on Friday, October 19, 2018: 

Thanks to efforts by the Chinese communist government to rein in the country’s horrendous national debt (300 percent of the country’s total annual output of goods and services), the Chinese economy was already slowing. According to “official” numbers released earlier this week (always questionable if not outright false), the economy grew by 6.5 percent in the third quarter on an annualized basis, down from 6.7 percent in the second quarter, and down from 12.2 percent just eight years ago.

The panic among top Chinese communist officials is palpable:

This article was published by The McAlvany Intelligence Advisor on Wednesday, October 17, 2018: 

There was a moment in the 1981 film Chariots of Fire when Eric Liddell was bumped onto the grassy infield during a quarter mile race. Once he recovered, he was 30 yards behind the pack of runners. Let Simon Burnton of The Guardian tell the story:

In Stoke on Trent in July 1923, in a race run over a quarter of a mile, England saw just how true this was. At the first bend he tripped over the legs of the English runner JJ Gillies, falling off the track. By the time he was back on his feet, the last of the other runners was 30 yards away and moving fast, but Liddell attacked them with such pace that he finally overtook Gillies three yards from the line to win before collapsing, spent, to the ground.

 

“The circumstances in which Liddell won the event made it a performance bordering on the miraculous,” wrote The Scotsman. “Veterans, whose memories take them back 35 years, and in some cases even longer, in the history of athletics, were unanimous in the opinion that Liddell’s win in the quarter-mile was the greatest ever track performance that they had ever seen.”

The U.S. economy, as astonishing as its performance is, is no Eric Liddell. JJ Gillies [the federal government] is just too far ahead.

On Monday, the White House officially announced

This article appeared online at TheNewAmerican.com on Tuesday, October 16, 2018:  

The White House just officially announced the final numbers for Fiscal Year 2018, which ended September 30. They are ugly: The gap between revenues and spending widened to $779 billion over the previous year, a jump of $113 billion (or 17 percent), despite increased revenues. This is the third consecutive year of rising deficits, with no apparent end in sight.

The White House blamed the usual suspects: the rising costs of “entitlement” benefits (i.e., Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and others) and increasing interest costs to service the rising national debt.

Those interest costs increased by one-quarter this year over last, from $263 billion in 2017 to $325 billion in 2018. By 2020, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) estimates that interest costs will increase by another 50 percent, to nearly $500 billion.

There is no more talk of how the expanding economy will throw off revenues sufficient to start shrinking the national debt. Now, according to Office of Management and Budget (OMB) Director Mick Mulvaney, the best that can be hoped for is some eventual shrinking of the government’s annual deficits: