Living by a Premise

2023-04-25

In 1934, at the behest of Prime Minister R.B. Bennett and with the approval of Parliament, Canada’s central bank, the Bank of Canada (BOC), was founded. It began operations in 1935. Its job is “to promote the economic and financial welfare of Canada.” It is now 2023, and more than half of Canadians are living hand to mouth, a trend that has been well established for many years. How much longer do we have to wait for the BOC to do its job?
The BOC continues to operate because its real purpose is not to promote the economic and financial welfare of Canada, but rather to promote the economic and financial welfare of Canada’s political class, including bankers, at the expense of regular citizens. The BOC is able to do this because equality under the law does not exist in a democracy, where

2023-04-22

[From chapter 23 of The Case Against the Fed.]
Having examined the nature of fractional reserve and of central banking, and having seen how the questionable blessings of Central Banking were fastened upon America, it is time to see precisely how the Fed, as presently constituted, carries out its systemic inflation and its control of the American monetary system.
Pursuant to its essence as a post-Peel Act Central Bank, the Federal Reserve enjoys a monopoly of the issue of all bank notes. The US Treasury, which issued paper money as Greenbacks during the Civil War, continued to issue one-dollar "Silver Certificates" redeemable in silver bullion or coin at the Treasury until August 16, 1968. The Treasury has now abandoned any note issue, leaving all the country’s paper notes, or "cash," to be

2023-04-20

The original vicious circle starts with inflationary interventions in an up-to-then well-anchored monetary regime. Consequent asset inflation spawns a banking crisis. That leads to the installation of anticrisis safety structures (one illustration is a novel or enhanced lender of last resort). Alongside a possible monetary regime shift, these damage the money’s anchoring system. A great asset inflation emerges and leads on to an eruption of another banking crisis, devastating in comparison with the first.
An array of additional safety structures is put in place which makes the now-bad money worse than before. After a long and variable lag, a long and violent monetary storm means the safety structures fail, a banking crisis again erupts but this time milder than the previous.
Then a further

2023-04-18

Every decade or so bank failures and the subsequent bailout response via central bank intervention appear. The latest jangling of depositor nerves involved US regional banks and a certain Swiss bank of great systemic importance. As James Grant writes in his book Bagehot: The Life and Times of the Greatest Victorian, “In economics, the most ostensibly rigorous of the social sciences, progress–and error, too–are cyclical; we keep stepping on the same rakes.” Sounding Rothbardian, Grant writes, “In banking, though, accidents came in clusters. Bank runs, unlike train wrecks, were contagious.” Nothing has changed.
Walter Bagehot famously urged the Bank of England—or “the Old Lady,” as the world’s first central bank is referred to in Grant’s elegant telling of Bagehot’s life and the economic

2023-04-17

Do Americans have the right to know if the $100 billion in their tax dollars that the Biden administration is delivering to Ukraine is being wasted? No, according to the U.S. Congress – which recently voted against creating an Inspector General to investigate whether handouts to the most corrupt government in Europe were being stolen.
Do Americans have the right to know if their own government blew up the Nord Stream pipeline, the biggest act of environmental terrorism in history? The Washington Post reported that the message from the U.S. and western European governments is “Don’t talk about Nord Stream.” So almost all reporters were “good boys” and moved along.
Do Americans have the right to know if Biden administration officials have perennially made false statements about the prowess