From New York to London to Brussels to Tokyo, central banks in the last two weeks have embraced a wide variety of extraordinary inflationary measures to prop up insolvent banks and governments.
The popular narrative is that demographics are driving Japan's declining worker productivity. But the real culprit is government regulations and a lack of entrepreneurship.
Central banks have created a brittle economy without real savings and without much room to maneuver. Central banks now want more of the same in a bid to fix what they broke.
The Greeks haven't saved or produced enough to justify their high standard of living compared to other countries of the world. This is a fragile bubble economy made possible by European central bankers.
Every crisis caused by the unbacked paper money system expands the power of the states over economic and social life, and unfortunately, once the state has expanded its power, it is unlikely the trend will be reversed.
Between 1909 and 1913, Keynes was the most important defender of British monetary imperialism in India. His faithful defense of the British Empire in those early years allowed him to become the century’s most influential economist after the war.
Printing up paper money—which is the Fed's solution to nearly everything—will not bring about a miraculous replacement of the lost goods and services or repair broken supply chains.
Real wages in Japan have been declining thanks to decades of expansionary monetary and fiscal policies. Now "Japanization" increasingly looks like a fate that awaits Europe.
By announcing that it is willing to throw up to $1.5 trillion in electronically created money in order to give three-month loans to those institutions that bought Treasury debt earlier, the Fed is bailing out not only the holders of Treasury debt, but also the Treasury itself.
As the nation-states take the brunt of their economic collapses on the chin, they will begin to realise that the EU superstate is little more than an obstructive and costly irrelevance.
