Money and Banks

The introduction of the euro consists simply of introducing another "managed" paper currency. Whether it will go up or down against other currencies will continue to depend on how it and the other ones are managed. 

Since the government's rules for money creation are not working, it seems that the only plan of action that today's Keynesian economists should accept is for government to make counterfeiting legal. Lest anyone think this is silly, imagine the "stimulus" benefits that counterfeiting would produce.

Watchdog groups are correct to monitor the disbursement of the Red Cross's September 11 donations.  And the issue of appropriate uses of charitable funds promoted for a particular purpose must be addressed. But the same issue should be raised about innumerable government initiatives whose claimed goals are also undermined by the same diversion of resources.
 

Gold is the antidote to inflationary money. Gold, its advocates have said through the centuries, protects an individual against the damage caused by the disease called inflation that is created by central banks. Gregory Bresiger reviews Peter Bernstein's attempt to debunk: The Power of Gold: History of an Obsession.

Making the boom continue at home and abroad has been the prime focus of U.S. monetary policy for quite some time. But among the unintended consequences emerge the broadly based lowering of perceived risk levels in the financial markets and a global spread of careless investment activities.

We will never resort to a bailout, said the Bush administration concerning the financial failures of the Argentinian government. That was one week before the same administration arranged an $8 billion line of credit for the same government.

Government is far from the economy's savior.  Rather, it is a parasite, a cancer, that eats away at the wealth of its citizens with its fiat currency, its many billions of dollars of expropriated wealth, and its multitudinous directives.

One day in 1953, an employee of the United States Bureau of Engraving and Printing with a distinguished ten-year employment record and a wife and two young sons, decided to become a thief. And working at the Bureau for the government showed him how he could do it.

When we talk about demand for money, what we really mean is the demand for money's purchasing power. After all, people don't want a greater amount of money in their pockets; they want greater purchasing power in their possession.

It would be the supreme irony if, in Greenspan's eager rush to bail out his constituents at the first whiff of every trouble from Y2k to WTC, all he and his myrmidons on the lower slopes of Olympus have accomplished is to topple the very banks they are there to protect.