[billflax]

End the Fed, cut federal spending and stablize the currency to smooth out business cycles.

[Tublecane]

This is an oddly accurate assessment. Why wasn’t anyone saying this four years ago? Or, more pertinently, why wasn’t anyone listening.

I suppose it’s easier to say now that it’s not an emergency, fire is not raining from the heavens, and responsible government office owls are not threatening people with martial law to get their way.

Our knee jerk reaction in times of crisis is to Do Something, which means government doing something. So long as monetary policy can reliably produce crises, and it will, they can blame the market and subsume us all under the iron fist of help.

[mjp]

Most alarmingly, Washington combats the recession by rehashing the policies which engineered financial turmoil: low rates, weak dollars and large deficits.

And then, when inflation starts to get out of control during the expansion phase, the government becomes afraid of hyperinflation and has to put the brakes on the creation of money out of thin air. When there is a significant deceleration in the growth of the money supply, there is another contraction phase, and financial crises, and recession.