Once a recession sets in, markets can only repair themselves if prices — including wages — are allowed to fall where necessary. The resulting increases in real interest rates are the key to spurring new economic activity.
Europeans have long been fearful of the prospects of price deflation, but now that it has arrived they have embraced it.
The Fed has been messing with interest rates for a century and suddenly they have forgotten how to raise interest rates?
Data from Japan, Spain, Greece, and the Netherlands all suggest that deflation is not the disaster many economists suggest it is. In fact, there's good reason to believe that economies really start to take off when prices fall the most.
The weak dollar was a subsidy for the oil industry, but as Hazlitt noted, they make “the industries in which we are comparatively inefficient larger, and the industries in which we are comparatively efficient smaller.”
Joseph Salerno Interviewed on Gold Standard, Fiat Money...
Milton Friedman once compared monetary stimulus to daylight saving time. But while daylight saving has an ending date, current monetary stimulus has no end in sight, and we’re just moving the clock ahead repeatedly without ever moving it back.
An out of print (1991) publication of the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago provides an excellent summary of Fed money mechanics.
