Peter Schiff – Weak Dollar Will Drive Price of Gold Up.
posted by Josiah Garber on November 9, 2009
in Economics, Politics, War & Peace
The Wall Street Journal: The Man Who Predicted the Depression
posted by Josiah Garber on November 9, 2009
in Economics, Politics
By MARK SPITZNAGEL
Ludwig von Mises was snubbed by economists world-wide as he warned of a credit crisis in the 1920s. We ignore the great Austrian at our peril today.
Mises’s ideas on business cycles were spelled out in his 1912 tome “Theorie des Geldes und der Umlaufsmittel” (“The Theory of Money and Credit”). Not surprisingly few people noticed, as it was published only in German and wasn’t exactly a beach read at that.
Taking his cue from David Hume and David Ricardo, Mises explained how the banking system was endowed with the singular ability to expand credit and with it the money supply, and how this was magnified by government intervention. Left alone, interest rates would adjust such that only the amount of credit would be used as is voluntarily supplied and demanded. But when credit is force-fed beyond that (call it a credit gavage), grotesque things start to happen.
Government-imposed expansion of bank credit distorts our “time preferences,” or our desire for saving versus consumption. Government-imposed interest rates artificially below rates demanded by savers leads to increased borrowing and capital investment beyond what savers will provide. This causes temporarily higher employment, wages and consumption.
Ordinarily, any random spikes in credit would be quickly absorbed by the system—the pricing errors corrected, the half-baked investments liquidated, like a supple tree yielding to the wind and then returning. But when the government holds rates artificially low in order to feed ever higher capital investment in otherwise unsound, unsustainable businesses, it creates the conditions for a crash. Everyone looks smart for a while, but eventually the whole monstrosity collapses under its own weight through a credit contraction or, worse, a banking collapse.
The system is dramatically susceptible to errors, both on the policy side and on the entrepreneurial side. Government expansion of credit takes a system otherwise capable of adjustment and resilience and transforms it into one with tremendous cyclical volatility.
Ron Paul: Healthcare “Reform” Will Make a Flawed System Immeasurably Worse
posted by Josiah Garber on November 9, 2009
in Economics, Health, Politics
Jake Towne on FOX’s Freedom Watch with Judge Napolitano
posted by Josiah Garber on November 8, 2009
in Economics, Politics, War & Peace
Judge Napolitano discusses War and the Economy with Jake Towne and other panelists.
No I don’t trust Glenn Beck. Sorry.
posted by Josiah Garber on November 4, 2009
in Politics
This New Bubble Could Be Our Last.
posted by Josiah Garber on November 3, 2009
in Economics, Politics
“Our society is now based on consumption .. 70 per cent of the GDP. This is more than we produce. So to pay our bills, we use funny money invented in 1913 with the creation of the Federal Reserve and the fiat dollar based on credit (debt).. the fractional reserve system.
In 1930’s you bought what you could afford. You saved up to buy your home. The easy credit of the 90’s has destroyed the country. Now you borrow what you can’t afford .. and the nation’s done the same.”
“Phantom dollars, printed out of thin air, backed by nothing … and producing next to nothing … defines the ‘Bailout Bubble.’ Just as with the other bubbles, so too will this one burst. But unlike Dot-com and Real Estate, when the “Bailout Bubble” pops, neither the President nor the Federal Reserve will have the fiscal fixes or monetary policies available to inflate another.” “This is much bigger than the Dot-com and Real Estate bubbles which hit speculators, investors and financiers the hardest. However destructive the effects of these busts on employment, savings and productivity, the Free Market Capitalist framework were left intact. But when the ‘Bailout Bubble’ explodes, the system goes with it.
THE above are extracted statements made on the US and world economy by Gerald Celente, the head of the Trends Research Institute, a top trend-forecasting agency in the world. He had predicted accurately a number of previous events such as the 1987 stock market crash, the 1998 Russian economic collapse, the 2000 Dot-Com bubble burst, the 2001 recession, the US housing market collapse of 2008, among others. You may be wondering what this has got to do with the Nigerian banks and their MDS. The answer is a lot. In the current world economy, a bank will typically extend credit to borrowers in excess of the fund reserve it carries at any point in time in a practice known as fractional reserve banking.
By doing so, banks effectively increases the total money supply in the system above that of the total amount of fiat money in existence. Fiat money is a term used to define money that is not backed by reserves of another commodity such as gold, silver, or other tangible mineral or asset. The reality of this practice is that a bank will not have access to sufficient cash (fiat money) to meet all the obligations it has to depositors if they all decide to withdraw the balance of their accounts or deposits. Fiat money is usually given value by the government. The United States switched indefinitely to fiat money in 1971, with many developed countries’ currencies fixed relative to the US dollar. Our banking system is not home grown. Our financial theories and economic systems are largely wholesale adoption of western systems.
Operation Health Freedom – Peter Schiff
posted by Josiah Garber on November 2, 2009
in Economics, Health, Politics
Euro Pacific Capital President Peter Schiff talks about problems with the employer-based health care system and how costs would go down over time without government involvement in health care.
