The Bernanke Fed followed Keynes’s advice. The way to avoid a new slump is to keep interest rates low for as far as the eye can see as a way to overcome a lack of “animal sprits” and thus sustain a quasi-boom. As long as inflation is low, no harm, no foul. In fact, as the thinking goes, more inflation might be beneficial.
Central banks always result in feeding forces that centralize and expand the nation-state. The Fed’s policies in the 1920s, would provoke the Great Depression, which, in the end, wrenched political power from cities and state governments to the swampland in Washington
The prospects for an unwinding of the Fed’s bloated balance sheet without even more damage to the economy and a return to a more reasonable rules-based monetary policy, are significantly diminished under a Yellen-led Fed. It is time, not to restore a rules-based policy, but to denationalize money.
Real, lasting change comes only with education and with the intellectual movements behind them, and with a revolution in ideas. It’s up to us and the scholarship of the Austrian School to show the nature of central banks and state-dominated economies, and how it would work without them. Help continue the revolution.
The singular brilliance of the debt ceiling is that it keeps reminding everyone that there is a growing national debt that never seems to shrink. That is a tremendous service to American citizens who live in the dark regarding the borrowing machinations of their political overlords.
The state exploits the uncertainty in the population about the true reasons for the growing gap in income and asset distribution.
“If you say the goal of the Fed was to prevent calamities, then you have to say that it has been a failure.”
Somewhere around 1980, debt began climbing far faster than GDP. It is simply not possible to grow your debts faster than your income forever.
The transfer of bad debts to the balance sheets of governments and central banks cannot undo the destruction of wealth.
How does one know when a bubble is forming? Could it be as simple as applying a psychologist’s diagnosis?
