The lesson from the events of 2007-2008 should have been clear: Boosting GDP with loose money – as the Greenspan Fed did repeatedly between 1987 and 2005 and most damagingly between 2001 and 2005 when in order to shorten a minor recession it inflated a massive housing bubble – can only lead to short term [...]
Continue Reading →Every Monday morning the readers of the UK’s Daily Telegraph are treated to a sermon on the benefits of Keynesian stimulus economics, the dangers of belt-tightening and the unnecessary cruelty of ‘austerity’ imposed on Europe by the evil Hun. To this effect, the newspaper gives a whole page in its ‘Business’ section to Roger Bootle [...]
Continue Reading →We are now five years into the Great Fiat Money Endgame and our freedom is increasingly under attack from the state, liberty’s eternal enemy. It is true that by any realistic measure most states today are heading for bankruptcy. But it would be wrong to assume that ‘austerity’ policies must now lead to a diminishing [...]
Continue Reading →On August 15, 1971, President Richard Nixon declared that the United States would no longer honour its promise to exchange US dollars held by foreign central banks for gold at a fixed price of $35 an ounce. The innocuous term ‘Nixon closed the gold window’ that is now widely used to describe this act does [...]
Continue Reading →On Tuesday, July 3, London business paper City A.M. ran an editorial I wrote on Germany. The text is below. In the present debate on the Euro crisis, Germany is frequently portrayed as a model of economic strength, a beacon of fiscal prudence and a proponent of structural reform. Her resources seem endless and her [...]
Continue Reading →“Europe fights back against austerity” was how The Daily Telegraph headlined its weekend election coverage. “Anti-austerity movements are gathering pace across Europe following political earthquakes in France and Greece. A total of 12 European governments have now been dismissed in three years.” As the European welfare state is officially in its death-throes none of us [...]
Continue Reading →Anybody with any knowledge of economics should feel uneasy at the sight of a country where half of recorded economic activity is conducted by the state. Are such semi-socialist societies operable, and if so, for how long? That complete socialism is impossible and that any attempt to establish it must fail, we know for sure [...]
Continue Reading →When the tectonic plates underneath society shift, confusion reigns, together with wishful thinking. It appears that financial markets have again managed to get themselves into a state of unrealistic expectation. The European summit this coming Sunday (or the follow-up summit on Wednesday) is now supposed to bring a “comprehensive plan” to solve the European debt [...]
Continue Reading →What disturbing and nauseating image greeted us this morning from the covers of the morning papers: a smiling and moved Angela Merkel surrounded by a bunch of suited, self-satisfied, sycophantically grinning parliamentarians happily signing their country’s economic future away, burdening their fellow countrymen and women with financial obligations the grotesque size of which have long [...]
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