The Fed

"The ability of most market indicators is found to be weak, while the ability of the skyscraper index to predict severe changes in the business cycle is strong."

Our only hope is to (1) accept up front a twenty-percent fall in American living standards for a people living beyond their means for the past twenty-five years on the delusions made possible by fiat money, and (2) simultaneously discipline the creature from Jekyll Island, a.k.a. the Federal Reserve System, not to create new money just to prop up asset-price bubbles.

Wise citizens would do well to stay tuned to the penny and observe what it reveals about monetary policy and the future of the dollar.

Hayek was arguing that whenever and wherever credit is expanded beyond market dictates by a central bank, the result will be economic distortion.

The Fed has destroyed our money, funded unjust wars, given rise to a ghastly bureaucratic state, and pumped up more credit bubbles than we can count.

It is reality vs. fiat, independence vs. dependence, value that lasts vs. value that is the whim of the transitory political class.

Mises proposed ending the government money-supply monopoly — which he identified as the root of the problem — and returning money to the free market.

Wars are a principal means for the state to increase its power.

"To prop up the unhealthy, malinvested markets, governments must cannibalize the healthy markets to find the needed cash to transfer the wealth."

The Fed has already taken several drastic actions in an attempt to prevent deflation, but it remains to be seen whether it is even possible for it to achieve such a goal without destroying the dollar and the entire financial system.