Posted on 04/10/2009 5:49:51 AM PDT by all the best
Depression: What We Can Learn From It Today," the Mises Circle in Colorado; sponsored by Limited Government Forum of Colorado Springs and hosted by the Ludwig von Mises Institute. Recorded Saturday, 4 April 2009.
(Excerpt) Read more at youtube.com ...
This is just too depressing.
It is Greatly Depressing.
I still work, my wife still works, I have my family, food, fishing, my God.
Both my wife and i save alot and spend little but still live OK and take vacations.
I have my health.
I am a big fan of Ludwig von Mises....and this video should be shared EVERYWHERE!
Oh no the video is no longed available. I love Mises to pieces.
bfl
Ping for later
Thanks. I checked back and it was there. Long but worth it.
Very good presentation by Thomas DiLorenzo. Thanks for posting.
Capitalism doesn’t work when you don’t make things but prefer to run up huge foreign debts and prefer to stimulate our economy by easy money debt driven asset bubbles in real estate, credit default swaps, derivatives, and stock market. Von Mises Institute is just more Lala land fake capitalists. Sure free markets are great but lets see more free markets in real things not the financial crap such as derivatives that Wall Street pimps
That isn't capitalism that is interventionism brought about about by central bankers. It is "fake capitalism".
Von Mises Institute is just more Lala land fake capitalists.
In contrast to the foregoing Von Mises was the real deal.
Sure free markets are great but lets see more free markets in real things not the financial crap such as derivatives that Wall Street pimps
The financial sector was hardly operating as a free market. It was all part of a bubble machine sanctioned by the central bank and pumped up by artificially low interest rates. The fractional reserve banking system was encouraged to extend credit and to pursue leveraged profits beyond all fiscal sanity. They were right in the sense that there was no real risk to bear - the government would backstop them.
There comes a point where the leverage cannot be built upon any further and the consequences of prior mis-allocations of resources wrought by artificially high credit are realized. The big difference between a recession and a depression is that this point has been reached, and the balance sheets of most public and private entities must be brought back in line, and deleveraging must occur. This is a correction. While painful it is necessary to rebuild on more solid ground.
What scares me is that this is going to be a depression coupled with a fiat currency collapse, with dangerous new global collusion schemes, and that there is no safe gold-backed money to flee to.
“prefer to stimulate our economy by easy money debt driven asset bubbles in real estate, credit default swaps, derivatives, and stock market”
You ate terribly misinformed concerning mises. Abssolute ignorance of the Austrian school. No One and I mean NO ONE is more against “easy money debt driven asset bubbles”
“Von Mises Institute is just more Lala land fake capitalists.”
Again, total ignorance. “Lala land”? Austrians are based in reality rather than state force trying to manipulate reality. Free markets are PERFECT representations of reality. Markets are reality. Any attempts to interfere
are attempts to cheat reality and play let’s pretend.
My fear - of not having a legit hard currency to flee to - is more societal. How do we bill export invoices? How does Cost Accounting value assets? When does trade have more currency risk than entrepreneurial risk? Does it break down?
The US, UK, Switzerland and Japan are in for quantitative easing. The renminbi is quasi-pegged to the USD and the Chinese won't want to lose the war of competitive currency devaluations. There is enormous pressure on Western Europe to force the ECB to go along with quantitative easing. The Germans at least remember what hyperinflationary depression looks like.
What would global hyperinflationary depression look like?
Quantitative easing is when the central bank eases (increases) the money supply, not to reach a lower targeted interest rate - at this point it is as low as it can go - but to just to provide easing for the economy or to fight deflation in prices. It does this mainly by buying the government’s treasury and agency debts directly. So for instance, the Treasury creates notes and sells them directly to the Fed. The Fed writes a check and poof - new money is created and starts being spent by the government, payable by future tax serfs. This is purely monetary inflation. We started doing this formally in early to mid-March, the Brits started in January.
The renminbi is the yuan, the Chinese currency. The Chinese want at least 8% annual growth in GDP, so they are going to at least inflate in tandem with everyone else, because otherwise their currency would become stronger and so their exports would become pricier.
And then there is the massive reason why we have really undertaken this route. Debt. We have close to $12 trillion in public debt - cash basis - not counting the committed unfunded liabilities of social security and medicare, which add about $42 trillion, and not counting the guarantees issued for this crisis. In total we have $65T of debt, versus annual GDP of about $13T. How can government continue spending at high levels and pay down debts? Raising taxes like FDR did in 1937 took the economy down for another 7 years.
I doubt politicians have a plan to pay our debts other than to inflate them away. Since the Asians that have bought our treasuries are wary that that may be the case, and their exports to us are down because US consumers are not buying as much from them anymore, they may (have to) stop buying our Treasuries, even sell their existing USD reserves to finance home infrastructure projects, the Treasury may find no buyers for debt to finance all of the stimulus spending.
So, since raising taxes is painful and politically unpopular, and since the left hasn't spent years plotting to take the WH to become fiscal conservatives, since the Asian savers are on to us, and since the Fed has already given the Obama administration the QE EASY button, the most probable case is he is going to blister his thumb pressing it repeatedly.
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