Category Archives: Inflation

Updated: Prophet Paul & Good Guy Glenn (Beck)

Economy, Federal Reserve Bank, Inflation, Media, Ron Paul, Socialism

More TV traitors, who condemned and cussed Ron Paul, are calling on him to explain what he has been predicting vis-à-vis the consequences to markets of the government’s reckless squandering and its monetization of debts and deficits.

Glenn Beck is, naturally, no traitor, he’s a patriot—the only man on TV who gets it and is honestly grappling with the truth. Beck challenges the liars, and takes no nonsense from pols pretending to be good guys. He’s the only TV talker on whose show you’re likely to hear sentences and sentiments such as, “Where is that in the Constitution?”

Here is Beck’s latest interview with Paul, via New Liberty. The reality is BAD, but Paul is sounding better and better by the day. Transcripts are here.

Update (September 23): Sadly, Good Guy Glenn has joined the bad guys. He informed his devotees last night that, over the weekend, he had been beefing up on “editorials,” and had come to the conclusion that socializing whole industries was a necessary evil. Said Glenn:

“The $700 billion that you`re hearing about now is not only, I believe, necessary, it is also not nearly enough, and all of the weasels in Washington know it. … The bailout — I see this as just stopping the plane from falling out of the sky.”

Peter Schiff, President of Europaca, who is clearly libertarian (and Austrian on economics), tried to reason with Glenn:

“Now the problem is our pilot and our co-pilot, Bernanke and Paulson, don’t know how to fly. I mean, they’re blind. They’re drunk.
You know, they’re going to crash this plane even faster. You know, the bailout is actually going to make it worse because we don’t have the $2 trillion. We’re just going to print it up.
Instead of just the entire economy coming down, we’re going to take our currency and we’re going to have a much bigger crisis when our money isn’t worth anything and interest rates are double digits because nobody will lend us any more.”

AND:

“The government’s not going to save us. They did this to us. They’re the ones that created the greed by eliminating all the risks of mortgage lending in the first place. They say we have to do this, they say we have to go into Iraq because they had weapons of mass destruction. They were wrong. This plan is a weapon of mass destruction to destroy our economy and to destroy our currency.”

I say fire Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson, who, before joining the Byzantine bureaucracy, had a $40 million per-annum job on Wall Street. Hire Schiff.

More from wise man Schiff:

“The government is just borrowing and spending more money. They’re not letting the market fix the problem. And how are we going to get out of this mess with more government, with more inflation?
As bad as this collapse would be, this is going to make it worse. Doing something different would be shrinking government.”

But Glenn let the wise guys—the State’s stool pigeons—have the last word, which he then seconded.

Updated: Predicted Meltdown

Business, Communism, Economy, Government, Ilana Mercer, Inflation, Private Property, Socialism, The State

The brilliant Bob Higgs on the crumbling capital markets (read my comments following the “Snip”):

“The failure of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, setting in motion the biggest government bailout/takeover in U.S. history, brings a grim sense of fulfillment to competent economists. After all, what did people expect, that water would flow uphill forever?

This financial mega-mess is the same sort of event as the collapse of the USSR’s centrally planned economy, another economically unworkable Rube Goldberg apparatus that was kept going, more or less badly, for decades before it fell apart completely. Along the way, of course, famous (yet actually unsound) economists assured the world that everything was working out splendidly. As late as 1989, when the pillars were crumbling on all sides of the temple, Nobel Prize winner Paul A. Samuelson informed readers of his widely used textbook, “The Soviet economy is proof that . . . a socialist command economy can function and even thrive.”

In the future, we will see a similar breakdown of the U.S. government’s Social Security system, with its ill-fated pension system and its even more inauspicious Medicare system of financing health care for the elderly. These government schemes are fighting a losing battle against demographic realities, the laws of economics, and the rules of arithmetic. The question is not whether they will fail, but when—and then how the government that can no longer sustain them in their previous Ponzi-scheme form will alter them to salvage what little can be salvaged with minimal damage to the government itself.

Our political economy is rife with such catastrophes in waiting, yet the public always seems startled, and outraged, when the day of reckoning can no longer be deferred, and another apartment collapses in the state’s Hotel of Impossible Promises, loading onto the taxpayers more visibly the burden of sheltering the previous occupants.

Call it democracy in action or utterly corrupt governance; they are the same thing.

Each of these time bombs has at least one element in common: it promises current benefits, often seemingly without cost; but if it must acknowledge a substantial cost, it places that burden somewhere in the distant future, where it will be borne by somebody else. From the standpoint of society in general, every such scheme is a species of eating the seed corn. It satisfies the public’s appetite to consume something for nothing right now, with no thought for the morrow. It represents the height of irresponsibility by permitting people to live higher today than they can truly afford, financing this profligacy by borrowing recklessly and by taxing politically weak and ill-organized people in order to shower benefits on politically strong and well-organized special interests. …

The architecture of the Hotel of Impossible Promises is not arcane. All competent economists understand these things. Ludwig von Mises explained as early as 1920 why a centrally planned economy could not work as a rational system of allocating resources. The reasons why Social Security, especially its Medicare component, and many other such government programs contain the seeds of their own destruction have been explained time and again. Are the politicians who construct these structures really such idiots that they cannot understand the logic of what they are doing? Not at all. …”

[Snip]

The complete article is “Ticking Time Bomb Explodes, Public Is Shocked.” Read it. I disagree with the sentiment expressed in the last paragraph. Bob Higgs would find it hard to comprehend how stupid the corporate, political and academic elites truly are. This is the age of the idiot. Obama is an ass with ears. Ditto McCain. Take them at face value, Bob. Believe their idiocy. As hard as it may be for a man of your intelligence to grasp, they truly do not understand Mises and Hayek and Rothbard or even Friedman. The idea that misallocation of capital is inevitable in socialized systems is anathema to the incontinent legislators and the other cognoscenti. Psychologizing about their motives gives these intellectual tabula rasa more credit than they deserve. (Michael Rebmann of “North Buffalo Journal and Review” liked this rant.)

Update: I just saw CNN’s Campbell Brown, who, as I already noted, is not working with much, and her panel, laud the massive bailouts. Why? Because, as all agreed, the returns on this “investment” will be many times the investment. This is beyond rank utilitarianism. The concept of private property eludes Campbell and her commies. The risks in a bailout are socialized and the profits privatized. Theft is what this is all about–unconstitutional, criminal taking.

Liquidity Lunacy

America, Debt, Economy, Europe, Inflation

Reports the Wall Street Journal:

“The world’s major central banks banded together Thursday to flood global money markets with massive amounts of U.S. dollars, in hopes of taming a major source of the tensions rocking the financial system.
[Global Power Boost chart]

In a concerted move, the U.S. Federal Reserve said it will expand or introduce measures to shuttle dollars to major European central banks, the Bank of Canada and the Bank of Japan, so that those banks can provide short-term dollar funding to commercial banks. Officials in South Korea, Hong Kong, Taiwan and other markets also pledged to inject more money into their financial systems.

The central banks’ moves came in the wake of a meltdown in global financial markets as short-term funding markets seized up and investors piled into U.S. Treasury bills in an unprecedented rush to safety. Concerns about redemptions in the $3.6 trillion money-market industry — a key provider of liquidity to short-term funding markets — and rising strains in the banking system had sent short-term funding rates sharply higher Wednesday. …

The U.S. Fed boosted its U.S. dollar swap line with foreign central banks by $180 billion. (The swap line is an arrangement through which foreign central banks can get U.S. dollars from the Fed.)”

[Snip]

I’m no economist, but as a devotee of Austrian economics, I can’t see how more credit is helpful when the proper correction ought to involve a continued contraction of the hitherto orgiastic lending exuberance.

Bankrolling Fannie & Freddie Adds $5 Trillion to National Debt

Capitalism, Inflation, Media, Socialism

Bankrolling Fannie & Freddie will add $5 trillion to the national debt (which stands at $9.5 trillion). So says the brilliant Jim Rogers. (And you wondered why the dollar’s dying and our assets are devaluing by the day? Still, the band of fools, with Obama and McCain in the lead, plays on.)

Rogers also tells a CNBC anchor that if she doesn’t understand that taxpayers must not be defrauded to prop-up these fraudsters in perpetuity—she should get another job. Let these fascistic entities fail.