The community of soft-currency countries is not a community of economic conditions but a community of lax monetary and fiscal policies, a community of ignorance about monetary theory, of inexperience with monetary policy, and of political doctrinaire stubbornness.
In Krugman's world, prosperity is created by spending, and it does not matter who spends what on whom just as long as someone is spending.
Beware of economics columnists for The New York Times. The days when Mises and Henry Hazlitt wrote for the paper have long since passed.
Any audit that exposes the Fed's relationship to the state will be worth doing, even if the Fed's friends keep it where it is.
Remember the flight to "safety" into T-bills and T-bonds? Most people fled from hard assets. These are the victims. They believed the propaganda of the establishment.
As things stand, central banks' monetizing government debt is presumably the way forward for producing inflation — which is, and must be, defined as a rise in the money stock.
The entrepreneur takes calculated risks, and typically "builds" using the carpenter's rule: measure twice, cut once. If it does not make financial sense to build, the entrepreneur will not do so. In addition, the entrepreneur would later know — through the profit-and-loss mechanism — whether such a decision was prudent or foolish.
Another way of saying this is that any government with the power to take an atheist's money and give it to my church is also a government with the power to take my money and give it to Planned Parenthood. When we use force to restrict others' liberty, we endanger our own.
Think once more and above all of Germany, where time is running out fast — the time, I mean, during which repressed inflation can still be removed before the price-wage spiral gets going, notwithstanding all the controls of the occupation authorities.
The downturn might eventually end, but with ever more regulations imposed on the system, we might find ourselves never again living in a vibrant and prosperous society.
