Phishing for Phools provides confusion, and few benefits that go beyond age-old warnings to “be careful, someone might try to take advantage of you.” Many consumer advocates offer far more practical help.
The dollar has benefited mightily from the abandonment of commodity money, the Bretton Woods system, and the rise of competing fiat currencies. This is partly why the dollar has come to dominate international trade.
While it took the Federal Reserve almost six years to create 3.5 trillion in new US dollar liquidity after 2008, this time around, it took only ten months to unleash a monetary tsunami of $3 trillion, with the projection of at least another $1.8 trillion next year.
For people who remain mystified as to how populists like Donald Trump get elected, they need not look much further than this.
Corporate cost cutting sets the stage for future gains in profitability and productivity, and there is no resulting "paradox of thrift" requiring easy money policies to "fix" the problem.
The euro is moving further away from the original German idea of the common currency. Instead, the euro has become the tool of southern Europe, which seeks inflation to keep the gravy train going.
Ryan McMaken joins the show to discuss Adam Fergusson's seminal history of Weimar-era hyperinflation in Germany.
Central banks are claiming that their introduction of digital currencies is not tied to monetary policy, but it's clear that these digital currencies' potential effects on policy are precisely why they're being pushed.
Central bank digital currencies need to be centralized and manipulable to some extent in order to use them to implement monetary policy, which is central bankers' goal. This characteristic makes them a very risky proposition.
