Finally, thought some Mexicans, part of the $50 billion that Western taxpayers sunk into the bailout would get to native investors. In late August, Finance Minister Guillermo Ortiz waved $1.1 billion in the air for indebted individuals and companies. The result: the peso sunk like a rock, again.
We have the makings of a world central bank, thanks to the government officials from industrialized countries (the G-7) who met at Halifax, Nova Scotia, in June. U.S. Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin, as usual, got just what he wanted.
The economy is again teetering on the brink of recession, and everyone's calling on the Fed to do something—anything!—to prevent another economic slump. But while the Fed has mastered the art of messing up the economy, it doesn't have the ability to stop the bad consequences of its own manipulative actions.
The Clinton administration, working with Republican leaders, wants to do for foreign governments what the Reagan administration did for the S&L industry. The idea, as discussed at the Halifax world economic meeting, is to create a global bankruptcy court. It would restructure government debt wherever it may be, so long as the nation is on the verge of defult. It would then lend ever more money to debt-ridden governments.
The events of March 1995 could be a watershed in international monetary affairs. Beginning with the Bretton Woods agreement 50 years ago, the Federal Reserve system has been the global monetary regulator. The collapse of the dollar is a no-confidence vote that may have brought this role to an end.
Murray Rothbard begins this outstanding book by calling attention to a paradox.
Four in five Americans opposed the $50 billion Mexican bailout, but they were powerless to stop it. When the central bank says it's in charge—as it does in every financial upheaval of this magnitude—we are supposed to hold our tongues and leave it to the experts, even if their actions generate only uncertainty and volatility.
Richard Nixon thought that going off the gold standard would be good for himself politically. But his reckless action made possible, even inevitable, the explosive expansion of government spending, debt, and intervention that followed.
Governments, especially including the US. government, seem to be congenitally incapable of keeping their mitts off any part of the economy. Government, aided and abetted by its host of apologists among intellectuals and policy wonks, likes to regard itself as a deus ex machina (a "god out of the machine") that surveys its subjects with Olympian benevolence and omniscience, and then repeatedly descends to earth to fix up the numerous "market failures" that mere people, in their ignorance, persist in committing.
Alan Greenspan has received his foreordained reappointment as chairman of the Fed, to the smug satisfaction and contentment of the entire financial Establishment.
For them, Greenspan's still in his heaven, and all's right with the world. No one seems to wonder at the mysterious process by which each succeeding Fed chairman instantly becomes universally revered and indispensable to the soundness of the dollar, to the banking and financial system, and to the prosperity of the economy.
