Even though inflation is a hot topic these days, it’s been around forever. Not all prices rise at the same rate, though, so it’s fun to see what prices were like generations ago.
By looking at prices from way back when, it’s easy to see how the cost of living has changed. Here’s what you could buy with a dollar in the 1920s. Continue reading
Did you know that U.S. households are 17,690,000,000,000 dollars in debt? Of course household debt is only one part of a much larger story. The federal government is 34 trillion dollars in debt, state and local governments are absolutely drowning in debt and unfunded liabilities, and corporate debt is at an all-time high. As a society, we are on the greatest debt binge in the history of the world, and it just gets worse every single year. Continue reading
The Broken Bank
Most people don’t notice or realize that the Fed, literally right this moment, is insolvent. George Soros famously “broke the Bank of England in 1992… and we might see someone “break the Federal Reserve” within the next few years.
On Tuesday, September 15, 1992, the two most powerful financial officials in the British government held an urgent meeting that night to review their plan for when the markets opened the next morning.
The tone of the meeting must have felt frantic… even desperate… because the value of the British pound had been falling for weeks. Continue reading
How long will the world keep buying U.S. bonds, notes, and bills, or use the dollar as a reserve currency, if Washington is bent on fiscal self-destruction?
“We must not let our rulers load us with perpetual debt,” warned Thomas Jefferson in 1816. To him, burdening ourselves and future generations with debt should be rare in frequency and minor in magnitude. It may be defensible for long-term capital projects like roads, but for little else.
Massive, uncontrollable debt to finance current consumption spending was unthinkable to Jefferson. He would undoubtedly see it as a reflection of a nation’s moral and economic decline that could ultimately destroy our liberties. Continue reading
Gold Money Is the Root of All Good; Paper Money Is the Root of All Evil
~ A Blueprint for a New Gold Coin Standard ~
Millions of people who have read Ayn Rand’s 1957 monumental work “Atlas Shrugged” must have been impressed by an insert that could be entitled “Hymn to Money”. This insert is buried in the 1600 pages of the novel and is difficult to find. However, it is a self-contained literary masterpiece in its own right. For these reasons it may be a good idea to publish it separately.
Some remarks may be in order. Ayn Rand uses the word “money” in the sense of gold money. This may not be in line with current usage, but it is certainly correct etymologically. The English word “money” is derived from the Latin moneta, meaning “forewarner”, epithet of the goddess Juno. Her temple on the Roman Capitolium doubled as the Mint where the gold and silver coins of Rome were struck. Continue reading
In these days of rampant inflation, it’s imperative that we return to the gold standard – and the real thing too. By this I mean the classical gold standard, not the so-called “gold exchange” standard, and with no fractional reserve banking, just as the great Murray Rothbard wanted. In what follows, I’ll discuss some of the economic issues below, but it’s important to realize that it’s a moral issue as well. Continue reading
In the 19th century, notes Murray N. Rothbard, debates on monetary issues were highly public and intensely controversial. Do you favor the national bank? The gold standard? Bimetallism? What is your opinion of the free silver movement? What is most important: a highly liquid money stock that can prop up commodity prices, or a sound dollar that promotes thrift and discourages debt accumulation?
Should the monetary system reward debtors or creditors?
These were issues debated in the nation’s newspapers, discussed in political meetings, and raged on the streets. Every educated man had an opinion. Part of the reason is that, frankly, people were much better educated in those days. It is astonishing to think of today, but average people had the mental equipment to enable them to understand these complicated issues, if not always to arrive at the right conclusions.
The federal government had long been involved in money precisely because this is one of the first areas a government likes to get its grubby hands on when it takes power. The US government was no exception, despite constitutional provisions that would appear to restrict its monetary power. Continue reading
Pow-Not-so-Well
In June 2022, when inflation was raging at over 9% in the US, Fed Chairman Jerome Powell admitted to a reporter, “we now understand better how little we understand about inflation.”
“Uh, that’s not very reassuring,” the reporter chuckled.
Talk about an understatement. The Fed Chairman has the power to control virtually everything in the economy. Continue reading
Policymakers have a terrible habit of ‘solving’ problems by pretending they don’t exist. This is how they ‘solved’ the bank crisis last year. But as I point out below, the fundamental problems didn’t go away. And now that the Fed stopped pretending, we already have our first bank failure.
It’s barely been a year since the 2023 bank crisis in which several large banks, including Silicon Valley Bank and Signature Bank, failed.
At the time, I wrote that the bank failures weren’t over, and that there would be more. Continue reading
