The Fed

The present glut in the money markets, with excessively cheap money and its attendant evils and dangers to the credit structure of the country, is due to the concurrence of three main causes.

Though some comic fans will be quick to put the blame at the foot of Marvel for price increases, they would be more correct to blame the Federal Reserve, the "publisher" responsible for the creation of our supply of dollars. Though society has come to accept the general rise in prices as a normal part of our lives, before the founding of the Federal Reserve and the removal of the US dollar from the gold standard, prices held relatively steady.

A bailout is nothing less than a wealth transfer to those who made ill-advised credit decisions.

Rather, the real dream has always been to protect wealth from the evils of inflation, and the middle-class housing market generally served that purpose. Housing was the middle class's best hedge against a growing government intent on expanding its scope and power by inflating the money supply. Today, housing looks like a relatively weaker hedge, and if this trend continues, middle-class wage earners will have to find better assets in which to store the brunt of their wealth.

Wealth cannot be created by means of loose monetary policy.

Being fully aware of the dark side of the credit boom — that is its socially destructive ramifications — Mises argued for returning to free-market money, which he saw as the only monetary regime that would allow preserving the ideal of the free society.

MAN Financial chief economist Dr Frank Shostak has a warning for investors.

It seems that the policy of transparency (transparent tampering) that Fed policy makers are striving to implement under the banner of achieving price stability might not be that good for the health of the economy. Also, it is a contradiction in terms to suggest that by means of manipulation of the price indexes and interest rates the Fed could somehow set the basis for the efficient allocation of resources and fulfill the role of an agent for economic growth.

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?

Inflation, as this term was always used everywhere and especially in this country, means increasing the quantity of money and bank notes in circulation and the quantity of bank deposits subject to check. But people today use the term "inflation" to refer to the phenomenon that is an inevitable consequence of inflation, that is the tendency of all prices and wage rates to rise.