The Fed

Policies that force consumers to spend are also policies that force them not to save…

The complete transcript of the Institute's famous documentary on the Federal Reserve.

Bernanke is said to support stimulus

Tough times require cutbacks and a beefing up of savings.

Since it's so important, the main point just made needs to be repeated: credit expansion creates an artificial economic inequality by showing up in the stock market and driving up stock prices. Since the stocks are owned mainly by wealthy people, they are the main beneficiaries of the process. The more substantial and the more prolonged the credit expansion is, the larger are the gains enjoyed by wealthy people more than anyone else.

What government cannot do without causing even more problems is take positive action against symptoms, such as falling stocks or housing prices, rising unemployment, business failures, and falling incomes. This is precisely what caused the Great Depression to get its name instead of being called what it might have been called: the recession of 1929–1931.

The most important signal flashing recession is, of course, the subprime mortgage fiasco.

An unwise and overambitious foreign policy, and particularly the effort to do more than we are able to do, is the one thing which might in the end destroy our armies and prove a real threat to the liberty of the people of the United States….

Investments pay you money every month. Homes are just the opposite – money pits.

Mises said that such a monetary policy would ultimately end in the destruction of the exchange value of money.