The Fed has essentially created the biggest shipment of currency ever, but the crippled banking system hasn't yet delivered it to our prison camp. When it arrives, it might be handy to have some spare smokes around to trade with.
At no point in his speech did Mr. Dudley raise the possibility that the main source of asset bubbles could be the US central bank itself.
The individual is always ready to ascribe his good luck to his own efficiency…. But reverses of fortune he always charges to other people…."
– Ludwig von Mises
By piling on trillions to the national debt, the government will have to keep interest rates low for a longer period, promoting ever-greater debt. The result of this must be unsustainably higher levels of debt — and the worst financial crisis ever seen in the history of mankind.
"Interventionism is not an economic system, that is, it is not a method which enables people to achieve their aims. It is merely a system of procedures which disturb and eventually destroy the market economy. It hampers production and impairs satisfaction of needs. It does not make people richer; it makes people poorer."
The Obama administration pulled out the old bag of tricks and claimed that they only needed to loot the public of hundreds of billions and spend it on building up government, and then, wow, like magic, the entire economy would come back to life.
A thief is a thief, and all thieves impoverish their victims.
If Rothbard is correct, the entire basis of modern deposit banking, the fractional-reserve system, is a type of counterfeiting that must be abolished.
No matter how you slice it, the former Maestro spawned housing, commodity, and stock booms with his reckless policies.
An expansion of the money supply will cause discoordination, in the way that Mises, Hayek, and Rothbard have patiently explained — and Krugman has ignored. And if expansion proceeds by means of more bank credit, the upshot will be renewed malinvestment. To oppose monetary expansion is not moralism but simple common sense.
