The Fed

At the root of the problem are not mortgage-backed assets as such but the Fed's boom-bust policies.

As long as governments and central banks continue to focus on the monetary symptoms of the "secondary depression" and continue to ignore the structural aspects of the "primary depression," they act like quacks.

Only wealth generators can revive the economy by accumulating enough real capital. In this regard, no government or central-bank policies can replace wealth generators.

From “Choice in Currency: A Path to Sound Money”; the Mises Circle in Vancouver. Recorded 13 September 2008.

Mises would clearly see the solution to the fiat-money-generated world disequilibrium as a global return to a commodity-money standard with 100% reserve banking as the only monetary policy rule and a banking order that avoids the disequilibria generated by the politically motivated manipulation of the money supply.

It was the singular achievement of Murray Rothbard's America's Great Depression to have demonstrated that the Great Depression was a crisis manufactured and prolonged by the attempts to stop an inevitable downturn.

If we want to avoid the next great depression, all such government interventions should cease.

Free-market advocates and economists must continue to struggle against these harmful economic myths.

With sound money and no central bank, the debate over our country's future would take on new meaning.

"The essential flaw of so-called supply-side economics — the policy both of the Reagan administration and of the present Bush administration — was the failure to face up to the need to reduce government spending."