Mises knew: “Mass unemployment destroys the moral foundations of the social order. The young people…forced to remain idle, are the ferment out of which the most radical political movements are formed."
There's now no difference between monetary policy and other government programs designed to prop up firms, industries, and other favored groups. The Fed is simply another government planning agency.
France faces a future of spiraling debt and declining economic growth. So Emmanuel Macron has now embraced economic nationalism as a way out. It's not likely to work.
"Saving lives versus saving money" comparisons confuse ends with means. The end of saving the economy is not to have more money. The end is to have resources necessary to preserve the lives and health of countless human beings.
Efforts by US policymakers to boost crude prices and to throw a lifeline to high-cost US crude producers is the exact opposite of what prices are telling us the market needs at this time.
The less agile and adaptive a society is, the more severe its impotence in a crisis. Thanks to an obsessive reliance on monetary policy to fix every problem, our society has increasingly abandoned innovation and productivity.
The US and the world will rise from this crisis. What the government has to do is allow it. The government is there to facilitate, not to pick winners and losers.
Finn Kydland and Edward C. Prescott (KP), the 2004 Nobel laureates in economics think that technological shocks can explain 70 percent of economic fluctuations in postwar US data. Unfortunately their quantitative methods are simplistic and ignore the real problem: central banking.
