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Opinion from a Libertarian ViewPoint

Posts Tagged ‘Alan Greenspan’

Destroy the Economy, Win a Nobel Prize

Posted by M. C. on October 18, 2022

Therefore, under a fiat monetary system we cannot know the true value of goods and services. This is why to create a sound economy that provides prosperity we should audit then end the fed.

https://mailchi.mp/ronpaulinstitute/bernanke-116313?e=4e0de347c8

Oct. 17 – Former Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke is a 2022 recipient of the Nobel Prize in economics for his writings on how government should respond to bank failures. Honoring Bernanke for his advice on what government should do when banks fail is like giving a fire safety award to an arsonist.

Bernanke was Fed chairman when the housing bubble, created by his predecessor Alan Greenspan in the wake of the bursting of Greenspan’s tech bubble and the 9-11 attacks, exploded. When the housing market collapsed, Bernanke worked with Congress and the Bush administration to bail out big banks and Wall Street firms.

In the years following the meltdown, the Bernanke-led Fed tried to “stimulate” the economy via massive money creation, near zero interest rates, and “quantitative easing,” where the Fed injects liquidity into the market via purchases of financial assets including Treasury bonds.

The Fed’s post-meltdown policies produced sluggish growth at best, while laying the groundwork for the next bust. A sign that the next crash was around the corner came in September of 2019, when the Federal Reserve began pumping billions of dollars a day into the “repurchasing” market, which banks use to make overnight loans to each other, in order to keep that market’s interest rates from rising above the Fed’s target rate. The covid lockdowns then gave the Fed an excuse to push interest rates to zero and massively expand quantitative easing.

The Fed’s actions are the prime culprit behind the price inflation plaguing America’s economy. The Fed has responded to the price inflation by increasing interest rates, although rates remain much lower than they would be in a free market. The fact that even these relatively small increases helped push the fragile economy into recession shows the instability of our debt-based economic system.

Bernanke, and Congress, should have responded to the meltdown by letting the recession that followed the meltdown run its course. This is the only way the economy can adjust to the market distortions caused when the Fed increases the money supply and lowers interest rates.

Those who worry that this “don’t do something, just stand there” approach would inflict long-term economic pain on the American people should consider the economic depression of 1920. During this depression, the Fed refrained from trying to “stimulate” the economy, and Congress actually cut spending. The result was the downturn was quickly over. Sadly, the lessons of 1920 are largely ignored by mainstream economic historians.

In response to my questioning at a Financial Services Committee hearing, then-Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke admitted he did not consider gold to be money. Of course, gold and other precious metals are money because individuals have selected them whenever they had the freedom to choose a currency. One reason for this is that precious metals are uniquely suited to serve as a stable unit of account. In contrast, government rulers have favored fiat money precisely because it can never serve as an honest unit of account due to its value being constantly manipulated by central bankers. This is often done at the behest of power-hungry politicians. 

Therefore, under a fiat monetary system we cannot know the true value of goods and services. This is why to create a sound economy that provides prosperity we should audit then end the fed.



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How the lizard people avoid answering questions

Posted by M. C. on June 3, 2022

The best we can say about American elites is that they are deeply unimpressive people, and don’t know what they’re doing.

Another, rather more terrifying theory, is that they know perfectly well what they’re doing.

(This is an honorable disagreement among us.)

Whichever side you come down on, though, we agree that these are not people to rely on, or people who are going to improve your life.

The lockdown/mask/mandate regime should have made that clear enough, but the problem goes well beyond that.

Federal Reserve officials are another excellent example.

During the second George W. Bush term there were some excellent video compilations made showing just how in the dark then-Fed chairman Ben Bernanke was about every last trend that was about to blow up in Americans’ faces.

My favorite bit of Federal Reserve history involves former chairman Alan Greenspan explaining to Lesley Stahl how he managed to avoid answering questions before Congress. “I would engage in some form of syntax destruction, which sounded as though I were answering the question, but in fact had not.”

Stahl played for him a clip from a congressional hearing in which he had obviously been engaged in this practice. “Very profound,” he jokingly said to her after watching the clip. “Very profound,” she laughed in reply. “Impenetrably profound.”

Ha, ha, Lesley. Isn’t it just so funny the way our elites pull the wool over our eyes? What a knee slapper!

So-called progressives, meanwhile, who posture as protectors of the little guy, are curiously silent about the Fed, whose policies intensify inequality, reward influential people and institutions for their reckless behavior, and set the economy on a boom-bust cycle that can ruin people.

Just yesterday, Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen admitted that she’d been wrong about inflation, the precise thing that as a former chair of the Federal Reserve she would be expected to understand and anticipate.

“I was wrong then about the path that inflation would take,” she said. “As I mentioned, there have been unanticipated and large shocks to the economy…that I, at the time, didn’t fully understand.”

This problem was not caused by “unanticipated and large shocks to the economy.” If you’ve seen the money supply charts, you know that.

And we covered it on the Tom Woods Show with Gene Epstein, formerly of Barron’s:

https://tomwoods.com/ep-2092-inflation-what-caused-it-and-where-its-going/
I genuinely don’t know how ordinary people are enduring this present bout.

So remember, coming up very soon is the world premiere of the Money 2022 docuseries — which features normal people, rather than the lizard creatures who rule us.

You can watch the whole series for free if you register in advance. After that, they start charging for it.

What we are supposed to do in the current circumstances is a darn good question, and this series seeks to answer it.

The company making it is full of friends of mine, and has featured me in their documentaries as well. They have to deal with Big Tech censorship, so they rely on friends like me to spread the word about their important work.

Please click here to register for free:

http://www.tomwoods.com/moneyseries
Tom Woods

Be seeing you

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The Ron Paul Institute for Peace and Prosperity : Bill Dudley’s Noble Lie

Posted by M. C. on September 10, 2019

http://ronpaulinstitute.org/archives/featured-articles/2019/september/09/bill-dudley-s-noble-lie/

Written by Ron Paul

Former Federal Reserve official Bill Dudley’s recent op-ed calling for the Federal Reserve to implement policies that will damage President Trump’s reelection campaign states that such action would be unprecedented. Dudley claims the Federal Reserve bases its policies solely on an objective evaluation of economic conditions. This is an example of a so-called noble lie — a fiction told by elites to the masses supposedly for the people’s own good, but really designed to maintain popular support for policies that benefit the elites. Dudley’s noble lie is designed to bolster a rapidly (and deservedly) eroding trust in the Federal Reserve. The truth is the Federal Reserve has always been influenced by, and has always tried to influence, politics.

President George H.W. Bush and other members of his administration blamed his 1992 defeat on then-Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan’s refusal to reduce interest rates. Greenspan was more cooperative with Bush’s successor, Bill Clinton. Lloyd Bentsen, Clinton’s first Treasury secretary, wrote in his autobiography that the Clinton administration and the Federal Reserve had a “gentleman’s agreement” regarding support for each other’s policies. Greenspan also boosted President George W. Bush’s “ownership society” agenda by lowering interest rates after 9-11 and the collapse of the tech bubble, thus creating a housing bubble.

Ben Bernanke, Greenspan’s successor, facilitated both Bush W. Bush and Barack Obama’s bailouts, “stimulus” spending, and massive welfare-warfare spending with record-low interest rates and quantitative easing. Speculation that the Fed was keeping interest rates low during the 2016 presidential campaign in order to help Hillary Clinton was fueled by the revelation that a Federal Reserve governor donated to Clinton’s campaign.

Presidents have always tried to influence the Fed — usually pushing for lower rates to (temporally) boost the economy. President Richard Nixon was recorded joking with then-Fed Chair Arthur Burns about Fed independence. President Lyndon Johnson shoved Fed Chair William Martin against a wall after an interest rate increase. Johnson’s frustration may have been because he realized that the success or failure of his guns and butter policies was largely out of Johnson’s control. The success or failure of presidents’ agendas is often determined by a secretive central bank’s manipulations of the money supply. No wonder presidents spend so much time trying to influence the Fed.

The Fed’s history of influencing, and being influenced by, presidents is one more reason why Congress should pass the Audit the Fed bill. Auditing the Fed is supported by almost 75 percent of Americans across the political spectrum, including such leading progressives as Bernie Sanders and Tulsi Gabbard.

My Campaign for Liberty is leading a major push to get a majority of Congress members to cosponsor Audit the Fed in order to pressure House and Senate leadership to hold a vote on the bill. The American people have had enough of noble lies about the Federal Reserve. It is time for truth; it is time to audit the Fed.

Be seeing you

 

 

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EconomicPolicyJournal.com: The Man Who Spent the Prime of His Life Manipulating the US Capitalist Economy for the Benefit of Banksters Has Written a Book About Capitalism

Posted by M. C. on October 22, 2018

http://www.economicpolicyjournal.com/2018/10/the-man-who-spent-prime-of-his-life.html

By Robert Wenzel

The year 2018 may go down as the year of chutzpah.

There is, of course, this year, Crown Prince Muhammed bin Salman investigating the murder of Jamal Khashoggi which he ordered, but even more remarkable on the chutzpah scale is Alan Greenspan writing a history of capitalism.

Greenspan spent the prime of his professional career as Federal Reserve chairman manipulating the United States capitalist economy for the benefit of Wall Street banksters.

Specifically, Greenspan headed the Federal Reserve from 1987 to 2006. His gift to the American people during this period? Three recessions. (Technically, Greenspan was out of the Fed when the 2008 recession hit, but make no mistake, it was his mad money printing that created the housing-led 2008 financial crisis that landed like bird shit on the head of  his successor, Ben Bernanke.)

“Greenspan recessions”-shaded gray areas
Click on chart for larger view.

Read the rest of this entry »

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The Deregulation Bogeyman – LewRockwell

Posted by M. C. on October 12, 2018

On the eve of the crisis there were 115 state and federal institutions whose job it was to regulate the financial sector. We are to believe that if only we’d had 116, things would have been better?

https://www.lewrockwell.com/2018/10/thomas-woods/deregulation/

By 

Ten years after the financial crisis of 2008, your friends are still saying the same thing:

“Don’t you libertarians know the financial crisis was caused by deregulation?”

It was not in any way caused by deregulation. We have to get this right, and we can’t let it pass.

F.A. Hayek once noted how important history was to current events: if we misunderstand history, we’re going to do the wrong things in the present. So if we think the late nineteenth century was characterized by “monopolies” from which wise government officials rescued us (and, unfortunately, this is indeed what most people believe), we’ll have different views on antitrust law than we otherwise would. Likewise, if we think the Great Depression was caused by “laissez faire,” that will influence the kind of economic policy we advocate today… Read the rest of this entry »

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Thank You, Alan Greenspan, Ben Bernanke and Janet Yellen

Posted by M. C. on August 13, 2017

A real estate bubble, just like last time.

Caused by fed easy money, just like last time.

http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/economicpolicyjournal/YZSb/~3/4joxeFdyrGk/thank-you-alan-greenspan-ben-bernanke.html

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