The very first votes of the 2016 presidential election season were cast this week in the Iowa caucuses. This is supposed to fill us with happy thoughts about self-government, civic virtue, rational deliberation, and about politics as the way the people’s will is put into effect.
Former baseball player José Canseco, who wrote a tell-all book on steroid use in baseball, is no fan of negative interest rates, recently tweeting:
Who is advising Japan? Forcing banks to lend all ¥ will not get 2% inflation. It creates loanees market with even lower rates. Dumb move.
Professor Salerno has often written and spoken on the war on cash that has been developing in Western economies—predominantly in the U.S. and Scandinavian countries—as a means to track citizens’ private financial dealings and enable negative interest rate policy. This phenomenon is part of the larger scheme through which governments cover their tracks in terms of monetary policy and prop up the banking system.
Recorded at the Mises Circle in Houston on 30 January 2016. Includes an introduction by Jeff Deist.
I received some requests to elaborate on certain points made during a speech this past weekend at the Mises Institute’s event in Houston. The talk contrasted the emergent alt-Right with the resurgent socialist Left, and how libertarians might tap into the populism embodied in both movements.
A few thoughts:
It should come as no surprise that the German government has finally succumbed to the pressure to join the global War on Cash. It is now considering the imposition of a limit of 5,000 euros ($5,450) on cash transactions. The official reason involves the usual statist malarkey that cash facilitates terrorism and criminality.
The Virginia Tech Professor who blew the whistle on lead in the water in Flint, MI thinks “public science” has been broken. Not knowing its been a broken system all along. In a recent interview, he comes forth with a stinging indictment of government-supported science. He does understand that this widespread problem of incompetent, worthless and dangerous research is a funding problem.
Recorded at the Mises Circle in Houston, Texas, on 30 January 2016.
Will the libertarian message get swept under the rug over the next year, as the candidates unleash an orgy of statist rhetoric? Or are hopeful cracks beginning to show, as the two parties, mainstream media, academia, and PC enforcers increasingly lose credibility with the public?
Last year was a tough one for investors. Gold was down 10 percent. The Dow Industrials fell 2.5 percent, and most bond indexes finished down by at least that much.
One institution that performed remarkably well in 2015 was the Federal Reserve. It just finished its most profitable year on record. The $100 billion in net income earned last year was a slight improvement over the previous year. That total was also roughly three times higher than the Fed’s income from 2007, the last year before it initiated its Quantitative Easing programs in the wake of the financial crisis.
The insidious nature of the war on cash derives not just from the hurdles governments place in the way of those who use cash, but also from the aura of suspicion that has begun to pervade private cash transactions. In a normal market economy, businesses would welcome taking cash. After all, what business would willingly turn down customers?
