Business Cycles

Booms are not periods of prosperity but of the squandering of wealth. The longer they last, the worse is the devastation that follows.

Beginning in 2007 and culminating in 2008, the home-ownership myth was smashed, as values all over the country plummeted, wiping out a primary means of savings and instilling shock and awe all across the country. The thing that was never supposed to happen had happened.

On the contrary, the record of nearly every government in the world, in our time, is one of recurrent or continuous monetary inflation. It is to this monetary inflation that the apparent "successes" of full-employment policies are due.

Uh oh, Mr. Bernanke, the natives are getting restless. Now it's not just Sarah Palin and Glenn Beck, or foreign central bankers, but more and more American economists who are starting to openly challenge the second round of "quantitative easing."

Can the government tell the Fed what to do? If Congress and the president are agreed about what to do, yes. If there is disagreement over monetary policy — and there usually is — then the Fed does pretty much what it wants.

If we wish to culminate the fall of the Berlin wall and get rid of the real socialism that still remains in the monetary and credit sector, a priority would be the elimination of central banks, which would be rendered unnecessary as lenders of last resort if a 100 percent reserve reform were introduced.

We've only had 294 failures this cycle, but it is a big deal: adjusted to current dollars, the Depression banking crisis was $100 billion, the S&L crisis was $923 billion, and the current crisis is nearly $8 trillion.

 We are witnessing the fall of the American dream, which has always been about having hope in the future. This is a striking fact of our times, one made even more devastating as we look at the economic fundamentals.

Paul Krugman is despairing of late, because a growing number of mainstream economists are adopting (versions of) Austrian business-cycle theory. The most recent convert is Minneapolis Fed president Narayana Kocherlakota.

Krugman dismissed the idea that Keynesianism was best suited for totalitarianism and he ignored my inquiry about the fact that the mess we are in is precisely because the US government has pursued Keynesian policies for the past eight decades.