Introduction

With my talk, I would like to accomplish three goals:

First, I want to explain some sound and time-tested basics of monetary theory.

Second, I would like to point out why it is important to have a free market in money; that the battlefront of our time is not between, say, bitcoin, stable coins, gold, and silver, but between government-monopolized fiat monies and a free market in money.

At the end of September 2021, the Nord Stream 2 project was a reality after many years of uncertainty. At that time, there were only a few more regulatory hurdles remaining for Germany and Russia to seal the deal on the long-awaited and highly controversial natural gas pipeline. Achieving such a feat would have been a milestone in energy cooperation between the two countries.

According to Jordan Peterson, left-wing totalitarians are characterized by an ideology in which group identity is paramount. I will demonstrate that this is a misconception. Historically, socialists have fought against feudalism and capitalism in the name of emancipating the individual from any kind of group or class identity. The totalitarian tendencies of socialist thinking stem from its insistence on using the state as an instrument to destroy all group identities and bonds that (allegedly) hinder the individual from becoming truly free.

One of the key myths of the twentieth century is the benign role played by international, American-led institutions after the Second World War. American liberals/progressives, fresh from imposing the New Deal in the thirties and planning and directing a world war, turned their eyes to international affairs: the United States had a world historic mission of messianic proportions: lifting developing countries into modernity by remaking them (and all other countries, for that matter) in America’s own image.

Alex Pollock explains that something is wrong with the Fed, big time. And it really shows in 2022. Pollock writes::

The powerful and prestigious Federal Reserve is having a tough year in 2022 in at least three ways:

• It has failed with inflation forecasting and performance;
• It has giant mark-to-market losses in its own investments and looming operating losses;
• It is under political pressure to do things it should not be doing and that should not be done at all.

Forecasting Inflation

A famous aphorism says, “You cannot hit a target you cannot see,” which expresses a more general truth. We cannot hit what we cannot see, because seeing allows us to discern things of interest from everything else; it focuses on a signal, on a target, rather than the noise around it.