Booms and Busts

Where is Bernanke going to create the next bubble, the one that will mask the hangover from the housing bubble in the same way that the housing bubble masked the hangover from the tech stock bubble?

The Panic of 1819 was America’s first great economic crisis.

Though western central banks have not been printing nearly as fast as their Zimbabwe counterpart, they do have a long history of increasing the money supply. It forces one to ask how much of the growth in Western stock markets over the preceding twenty-five years has been created by a vastly increasing money supply, and how much is due to actual wealth creation.

An interesting case of the failure of micro-central planning comes from Shaliuhe, China,

If history is any judge, financial meltdowns like what's happening in the subprime arena prompt the Federal Reserve to act in the only way it knows how. The Fed's playbook was written with its inception in 1913 and anointed by easy money cranks like Alan Greenspan and his successor in crime Ben Bernanke along the way.

You don't have to be a rocket scientist to solve these problems. We need to return to the sound monetary policy of the gold standard and an America where education and assistance to the needy are in the hands of the private sector, not government bureaucrats.

Our fiscal problems can be explained by an Internal Revenue Service that isn’t aggressive enough.

This article from the Atlanta Journal-Constitutio

Presented to the Auburn University Libertarians; Auburn, Alabama, on 17 February 2007.

Bloomberg quotes me here.