Have nothing to do with the [evil] things that people do, things that belong to the darkness. Instead, bring them out to the light... [For] when all things are brought out into the light, then their true nature is clearly revealed...

-Ephesians 5:11-13

Tag Archives: Gary North

Despite Stock Sell-off, Few See Recession

This article appeared online at TheNewAmerican.com on Friday, February 9, 2018: 

Barbara Friedberg must be feeling pretty good right about now. Last October she made “10 Bold Stock Market Predictions for 2018,” and already she is scoring five out of 10:

Value stocks will triumph;

Cash will be king;

Inflation will inch up;

Market volatility will return; and

Bonds will offer higher yields.

The jury is still out on her prediction that “the Bull Market [in stocks] will end in 2018.”

Friedberg is no lightweight. She is a former portfolio manager and has taught finance and investments at several universities. She authored a popular book in 2014, How to Get Rich Without Winning the Lottery.

Despite the mantra that stocks’ performance is often a harbinger for future economic performance, few at present agree with her about the bull market in stocks being over.

The sell-off (which appears to be continuing as this is being written) in stocks is impressive. The Dow Jones Industrial Average (DJIA, or The Dow) has lost 3,227 points since its high on January 26, or 12 percent, while the S&P 500 Index (SPX) has dropped by 290 points, or 10 percent, since then as well. This is into “correction” territory and should be drawing negative outlooks on the future of the U.S. economy from every quarter.

But they can’t be found. Aside from perma-bears Michael Snyder and David Stockman, few of the usual suspects can be found who agree with Friedberg. When the Wall Street Journal polled its economists, they remained adamant about the health of the economy: GDP will continue to grow and unemployment will continue to drop:

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Herb Stein, Meet Mick Mulvaney

This article was published by The McAlvany Intelligence Advisor on Monday, October 23, 2017: 

English: Official portrait of US Rep. Mick Mul...

Mick Mulvaney

University of Virginia professor Herbert Stein, the father of Ben Stein of Ferris Bueller fame, was known as a pragmatic conservative. But he is best known for his cryptic expression, “If something cannot go on forever, it will stop.”

Mick Mulvaney’s hopeful outlook hasn’t yet been tarnished by his experience in Washington. Serving as a member of the House of Representatives from South Carolina prior to accepting the position of President Trump’s Director of Office of Management and Budget, Mulvaney really thinks, based on his public statements, that things really can go on forever. All that is needed is a little tweaking: “We need to grow our economy again and get our fiscal house in order. We can do that through smart spending restraint, tax reform, and cutting red tape.”

A closer look at the size of that fiscal deficit, however, reveals Mr. Mulvaney’s naiveté: on Thursday the Treasury Department announced that the deficit for the fiscal year that ended on September 30 was

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Anti-gun Researcher Frightened by How Many Guns Americans Own

This article appeared online at TheNewAmerican.com on Tuesday, September 5, 2017:

Image of the Bill of Rights (United States Con...

The virulently anti-gun group The Trace sent an e-mail blast to its members last week, alerting them to what it said was the danger of an overly and unnecessarily armed American citizenry:

Jennifer Mascia [a member of “TeamTrace”] pulled some numbers from the Small Arms Survey, which gauges gun stockpiles in the hands of civilians, law enforcement, and militaries around the world. She found that with an estimated 270 million firearms owned by everyday Americans, civilians own 70 times more weapons that all police and military services combined.

Mascia is an editorial assistant at the New York Times and was a regular contributor to its anti-gun column “The Gun Report” until it was shut down in 2014. Her source, the Small Arms Survey, is an international anti-gun group purporting to provide accurate statistics on all aspects of private gun ownership worldwide. Unfortunately, its reputation for accuracy has been tainted, with much of its reporting being challenged as “misleading or just plain wrong.”

In this instance, however, the numbers Mascia dug up from the outfit actually understated the “concerns” she expressed about how many firearms are owned by those “everyday Americans.” The real number isn’t 270 million — not even close — but is at least

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Food Stamp Dependency Dropping

This article was published by The McAlvany Intelligence Advisor on Monday, July 24, 2017:

English: Logo of the .

In its report released last week the USDA reported that SNAP – the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, the old food stamp program – is shrinking, a little. In 2016, 44 million Americans and immigrants (legal and illegal) took advantage of taxpayers’ largess, costing them $71 billion. In 2010, there were 47 million receiving SNAP benefits costing taxpayers closer to $80 billion.

The program, which began in 1969, has virtually exploded, from just 2.9 million beneficiaries that year (costing taxpayers a paltry $250 million) to a peak of 47.6 million in 2013, which cost taxpayers $79.9 billion.

Part of the shrinkage is due to

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Trump’s Digital Wall

With Gary North’s permission I have reprinted this article from Wednesday’s newsletter. The link to the original article is at the bottom.  

Juggling on the Berlin Wall on 16. November 19...

Donald Trump used a visual image for “seal off the border.” He used a wall.

He isn’t going to build a wall. He will not ask Congress for the funding.

He doesn’t need to.

The border can be policed by satellites and a few thousand low-cost drones. The technology is cheap. It is available now.

These are cheap drones that carry no missiles. They only carry cameras. There can be night drones and day drones. They can observe what is going on for miles.

Put up 1,000 drones at all times, day and night. Aim their cameras 10 or 20 miles south of the border. Is there a truck coming north toward a desolate area? Meet it with troops.

There will be enough troops on the cheap fenced border to head off 80% of the trucks. If 80% of the trucks can’t get their cargo through, the wholesale immigrant business is finished.

Post a thousand troops and drones at the high-crossing areas.

The strategy here is to eliminate the wholesale immigration business. Make the immigrants walk to the border in remote areas. This will drastically reduce the crossings. Move the immigrants from wholesale to retail.

MAKE A DEAL WITH THE COYOTES

Coyotes are the people who take money from desperate would-be illegal immigrants to take them across the border in trucks. They are middlemen.

I propose that Trump make them two-way middlemen.

A coyote brings a truckload of people to the border. On the American side of the border is a border patrol officer who is assigned to an Army unit. He makes the truck driver an offer: “Take them back. Here is $25,000, cash.”

Yes, I know: pretty soon there will be trucks loaded with fake immigrants. So, run the initial program for long enough to get the word out: “Don’t pay anyone to take you across the border. The gringos have cooked up a deal with the coyotes. The coyotes will take your money. Then they will take the gringos’ money to bring you right back.” Six months will do it.

If traffic starts back up, re-start the program.

Keep the immigrants on the Mexican side of the border. This way, there will be no expensive court hearings on our side of the border. There will be no ACLU attorney coming to the defense of illegal immigrants in the middle of the night in the South Texas desert. The immigrants will not cross the border. Mexico will retain jurisdiction.

Station enough troops and drones on the border to seal it off.

Better yet, arrange for the coyotes to bring the would-be immigrants to established check points. No muss, no fuss.

But, you say, no sensible coyote would do this. It would kill his business. So, stage it. Hire some Mexican Americans in South Texas to do a fake crossing at a fake border. Rent an old truck. Have an actor pay the “driver” a wad of bills. Use a dash cam. Make it look real. Then post the video. Do one of these a week. Use the same two or three trucks.

Have you ever seen Wag the Dog?

Trump can supply the video crew. He is a master of reality TV.

Keep the drones flying. Let the coyotes know that they will not be able to get their cargoes across the border. “We can see you coming.”

Maybe a truck turns around and heads home. The driver does not get $25,000. Word will get out: “Don’t pay this guy.”

Maybe the driver stops. He gets his $25,000. He drives them back. Word will get out. “Don’t pay this guy.”

Maybe he unloads them on his side of the border. He gets $25,000. He leaves them. Word will get out. “Don’t pay this guy.”

If he crosses the border, he gets no money. He loses his truck. He gets no food or water. He is sent back on foot with the others. “Have a nice walk with your friends.”

The people who get unloaded will be given two choices: (1) put on a GPS tracking device and start walking back to civilization with food and water supplied by the Americans, or else (2) don’t put on the device and get no food or water. There is this threat: “Take off the device before you get to town A, and the next time we catch you trying to cross illegally, you will get no food and water. And we will catch you. Take the device to our local exchange store, and they will give you $100 cash.” Of course, they are photographed at the border. Their faces go into a facial recognition data base. If they get caught again, they get no food or water for the hike back. “Buy food and water from your buddy.”

Why the exchange store? The store will advertise locally. “If you get caught when our drone system catches the truck that takes you to the border, and if the driver leaves you behind, you can get $100 for the GPS device you will get when you return from the border. We’ll make sure you are in our ‘caught trying to cross the border’ facial recognition system. Then you will get paid.”

Word will get out to the coyotes’ customer base.

Post Spanish language videos on YouTube. The viewers will see the drones, the troops, and the money exchanges. “Warning: the U.S. government has an arrangement with the coyotes. It pays the coyotes to bring people right back at a profit of $25,000 per truckload. You will pay $1,000 for a one-day round-trip visit to the border. The coyotes will make money both ways.”

Put up videos of families walking away from the fence in the middle of the desert. “This is what happens if you try to cross the border in a truck. The drones always spot the trucks. You will be greeted by American troops. Save your money.”

Goodbye, wholesale immigrant market. Hello, individual families on foot.

BETA TEST THIS BY LATE APRIL

This would be cheap to implement. The beta-testing could be operational within three months of Trump’s inauguration.

Put a bird colonel in charge of this. Offer him two stars if he gets it operational by Christmas, but only one star if it’s a day late. Trump can make this offer on January 21. He can ask for volunteers. He will get lots of volunteers by January 23. By February 1, there will be piles of applications.

This colonel would be granted the authority of a four-star general for this project until December 25, 2017.

The colonel will find holes in the system. Most of them can be plugged. He could then ramp up the program by October 31. It would be working by December 25.

Give the program until December 31, 2018 to work. By then, the flow of illegal aliens will be down by 80%.

Priority for Army promotions would be given to successful captains and majors who cut down immigration rates. The statistics would be simple: “Reduce the immigrants in your sector by 20% this year, and you go to the top five of the short list for promotion.” The Mexican border would be the fastest track to stars on the shoulder.

Word would get out. Fast.

CONCLUSIONS

Could Trump do this unilaterally? Of course. He is Commander-in-Chief. Paul Ryan isn’t. Mitch McConnell isn’t.

Trump doesn’t need a wall. He needs only the will.

Here’s the link to his original article: http://www.garynorth.com/public/15899.cfm

Latest Poll Rejects Republican Politicians, Favors Newcomers in Presidential Field

This article was published by The McAlvany Intelligence Advisor on Wednesday, September 23, 2015: 

One had to read well into CNN’s latest poll on the Republican contenders to discover a startling fact: Republicans, for the first time in memory, are rejecting Republican politicians en masse in favor of three who never have held political office. Here are the numbers from last week: Trump: 24 percent; Fiorina: 15 percent; Carson: 14 percent.

Much ado was made over Fiorina’s leapfrogging over Carson, and Trump’s fading by eight percentage points. But, deep into the report was this: “In a jam-packed GOP presidential field, the leading candidates are the only ones who have never held political office.” Here’s the math: those three are favored by 53 percent of Republican voters polled, leaving the remainder with the crumbs.

Gary North, an observer of the political scene ever since he worked as an assistant to Congressman Ron Paul in his Washington office in 1976, has never seen anything like it. In his members-only newsletter, North wrote:

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Stocks to Fall Further, Say Market Bears

This article was published by The McAlvany Intelligence Advisor on Wednesday, August 26, 2015:  

Marc Faber, the bearish financial commentator from Thailand whom financial talking heads in the media love to hate, really doesn’t care what people think. He’s old enough to know his own mind (he’s 69), and he’s been right often enough that his opinions carry plenty of weight. He’s also a curmudgeon. In his June 2008 newsletter, following the arrival of $600 “stimulus” checks in everyone’s mailbox, Faber wrote this, belittling the idea that much if any of that free money would help stimulate the US’s moribund economy:

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Truancy Laws Snag 13-year-old Piano Prodigy

This article first appeared at TheNewAmerican.com on Wednesday, September 10, 2014:

It took just one day for the chancellor of the District of Columbia Public Schools (DCPS) to respond to Petula Dvorak’s column in the Washington Post on Monday. Chancellor Kaya Henderson issued a public statement condemning Dvorak’s column for inaccuracies and claiming instead that she was working with Avery Gagliano’s parents to avoid charging the 13-year-old piano prodigy with truancy.

Gagliano was one of just 12 musicians selected from around the world to

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The Supreme Court’s Docket is Full of Cases that could Endanger Liberty

This article first appeared at The McAlvany Intelligence Advisor on Wednesday, October 9th, 2013:

The potential for liberty’s shrinkage during the Supreme Court’s session that began on Monday is significant, with some exceptions. The cases on the docket range all across the spectrum:

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Warren Buffett’s Railroad is Testing Natural Gas to Drive its Locomotives

The quiet revolution going on in the energy sector as a result of fracking is being punctuated by changes unseen and unappreciated, such as the recent announcement by Warren Buffett’s railroad, BNSF Railway.  The largest railroad in the country, BNSF is testing the use of liquefied natural gas (LNG) to

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Declines in Trust and Revenues Force Sales and Spinoffs of Formerly Prominent Newspapers

The back-to-back announcements of the sale of the Boston Globe to Boston billionaire John Henry and the sale of the Washington Post o Amazon founder Jeff Bezos earlier this week continue to track the shrinkage of the newspaper business that has been going on for more than a decade. Henry bought the Globe from the New York Times for just $70 million, a fraction of the

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NSA disclosures recall days of the East German STASI

When Wolfgang Schmidt learned about NSA leaker Edward Snowden’s revelations concerning its ability to collect personal data on millions of American citizens, he was astonished. As a lieutenant colonel in East Germany’s secret police, the STASI, his department was limited to tapping just 40 phones every day. If a decision was made to tap a new phone, one of the others had to be disconnected. Said Schmidt:

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Once Reviled, Capitalism is Making an Extraordinary Comeback Worldwide

This article originally appeared at McAlvany Intelligence Advisor

 

Hidden inside an obscure study just released by Barclays is a nugget of huge importance that reflects a sea change in the growth of entrepreneurial capitalism. The results of this development could equal if not exceed those of the

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Fox News president’s email to his people about the James Rosen affair

Here is Roger Ailes’ email, if you care to look. He says some nice things that I’m certain were reassuring to his employees who are probably asking themselves whenever they send an email or make a phone call, “am I being watched?”

Let’s remember who Roger Ailes is. He is

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More on Ponzi schemes like Social Security

I haven’t seen much lately about Ponzi schemes, much less about how Social Security is a Ponzi scheme “with a gun”. I first became aware of the nature of Social Security when I got into the life insurance business and was able to discern the difference between insurance, and Social Security which

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Gary North is worth much more than $10 a month

My subscription to Gary North’s newsletter just paid for it self in one commentary. His analysis of this article helped improve my understanding of their conclusion: prices could decline in the near future.

I subscribe to John Mauldin’s free newsletter which today consisted of an outlook by two other very bright guys, Lacy Hunt and Van Hoisington. I have read both of them. And Mauldin used to be a partner of Gary North. Confused? Don’t be. This is just to say that they have immense credibility with me and I would automatically be sympathetic to their point of view.

But with North’s analysis I now have a better understanding:

The Fed is deliberately driving down the velocity of money (how fast money circulates) by keeping the banks’ excess reserves with them rather than letting the banks lend them out. They do that by paying interest on those reserves. Look at it from the bankers’ perspectives: why would you loan your precious reserves to risky customers, even those with excellent credit ratings, when you can make risk-free loans to the Fed and earn interest there? True, it’s less interest than you might get from a customer, but with them you run the risk of not getting your money back. You don’t have to worry about that with the Fed.

So North thinks it’s a deliberate policy to keep the banks from lending, which keeps price inflation from hitting the grocery stores. He says it’s the best of all possible worlds for the Fed: they can continue to finance the government deficits with digital money without price inflation.

If, however, the Fed decides to stop paying interest on those reserves, or worse, decided to start charging interest on those reserves, this action would force the banks to take back those reserves and start lending them out. This would result in price inflation almost immediately. North thinks that if the Fed does that (reverses course), we could see prices double in a matter of months. For the time being, however, the Fed has no interest in doing that. I’m not sure why the Fed would ever start charging interest on those reserves. So price inflation is highly unlikely, and we might even see some small decrease in the overall price level. This is helpful information. It agrees with the conclusion by Hunt and Hoisington but I have a better understanding, thanks to North.

Here’s the link to North’s analysis. You’ll see that it’s a paywall. I pay $9.95 a month to get over that wall and read his stuff. This single analysis of a well-written article which could have misled me and my understanding of the world has paid for my subscription for a least a year. I think North is way undercharging. Don’t tell him I said so.

A very smart guy reviews Stockman’s massive new book

Whenever someone as smart as David Stockman (President Reagan’s Director of the Office of Management and Budget) writes a 768-page book (The Great Deformation), it makes me nervous, for two reasons: I don’t have the time to read 768 pages, but if I don’t I might miss something important. So I was gratified that

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Here’s another reason I’m not going to see Lincoln

Tony Kushner is the screenwriter for the movie Lincoln. Gary North has uncovered a video of Charlie Rose interviewing Kushner. It won’t take you long to come to the same conclusion: this guy is so far off the mark that anything he might have to say about Lincoln is going to be

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There is Only One “Natural Resource”

Rendering of human brain.

Rendering of human brain. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Donald Boudreaux wrote an article honoring Julian Simon five years ago and it’s just as relevant today as it was then. In it he notes that Simon was persuaded that there are no natural resources, save one: the human mind.

Simon’s most important contribution was to crystallize and explain an insight that even the best economists before him only glimpsed — namely, that human  beings in free societies are “the ultimate resource.” Nothing — not oil, not  land, not gold, not microchips, nothing — is as valuable to the material well-being of people as is human creativity and effort.

In this day of iPhones and fracking, the internet and hybrid automobiles, I think people take an awful lot of it for granted. We have enjoyed the benefits of freedom without understanding really how it works. We just expect it to

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Groupon no longer offers gun-related coupons. Who cares?

Groupon decided that ideology was more important than profits and halted offering any discount coupons related to guns or the gun industry such as training programs. They may be having second thoughts.

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Many of the articles on Light from the Right first appeared on either The New American or the McAlvany Intelligence Advisor.
Copyright © 2021 Bob Adelmann