The view of the day is that the “greedy rich” are sitting on stacks of cash hidden away in Swiss bank accounts or the Cayman Islands that are doing nothing but fueling their acquisitive vanity while actively preventing the emancipation of their fellow man. With a little redistribution, those stacks of cash could eradicate poverty from the face of the earth and fund social programs that would help the many. After all, who really needs a billion dollars, let alone several billion?

Once a year, one of the most important central banking conferences in the world takes place, in Jackson Hole, Wyoming. Per the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City, the purpose of the two-day event is to “discuss long-term policy issues of mutual concern:”

The event brings together economists, financial market participants, academics, U.S. government representatives and news media…

CNN Business reports that Exxon, which was the world’s largest company in 2013, is today being kicked out of the Dow. As CNN Business puts it, “Exxon is now a shell of its former self.” The company is losing money and its “market value has crumbled by a staggering $267 billion from the peak.”

Misguided lockdowns have destroyed the global economy and the impact is likely to last for years. The fallacy of the “lives or the economy” argument is evident now that we see that countries like Taiwan, South Korea, Austria, Sweden, and Holland have been able to preserve the business fabric and the economy while doing a much better job managing the pandemic than countries with severe lockdowns.

[A selection from Education: Free and Compulsory.]

This year is the seventy-fifth anniversary of the end of World War II. One of the biggest frauds of the final stage of that war was the meeting at Yalta of Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin, British prime minister Winston Churchill, and President Franklin Roosevelt. Yalta has become a synonym for the abandonment of oppressed people and helped inspire the 1952 Republican campaign theme “20 years of treason.”

Make the money cheap enough and government intrusive enough, and incongruous headlines appear side by side.

The title of this article epitomizes what the Austrian economist Ludwig von Mises (1881–1973) called the “sound money principle.” As Mises put it:

Listen to the Audio Mises Wire version of this article.

Technology exists that allows anyone to effectively hide from government’s prying eyes as long as they do some basic legwork.

The perennially awful US senator Lindsey Graham (R-South Carolina) is leading the charge on making sure Americans are denied that ability.

Recent data published by Yardeni Research Inc., Bank for International Settlements (BIS), the Institute of International Finance (IIF), and in the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis Economic Data (FRED) database offers an insight into the true extent of central banking practices before and during the covid-19 pandemic.

The wide-ranging implications of this can be seen through several critical dimensions. But first we must understand the destructive nature of central banking.