Monetary Inflation Won’t Create Economic Growth
2023-08-18
When it comes to matters of money and banking, all practical political issues ultimately hinge on one central question: can one improve or deteriorate the state of an economy by increasing or decreasing the quantity of money?1
Aristotle said that money was no part of the wealth of a nation because it was simply a medium of exchange in inter-regional trade, and the authority of his opinion thoroughly marked medieval thought on money. Scholastic scholars therefore spent no time enquiring about the benefits that changes of the money supply could have for the economy. The relevant issue in their eyes was the legitimacy of debasements, because they saw that this was an important issue of distributive justice.2 And after the birth of economic science in the 18th century, the classical economists
The Five Stages of Bank Failure Grief
2023-05-20
The talking heads on financial TV ask everyday where we are in the banking crisis. Is it over yet? After scooping up First Republic, JP Morgan’s Jamie Dimon said, “This part of the crisis is over.” After he said that, however, the shares of regional banks such as PacWest, Zions, and Western Alliance were cut in half. The market doesn’t believe Mr. Dimon.
Elisabeth Kübler-Ross described five stages of grief: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. On Twitter, describing the typical timeline for a banking crisis, Real Vision’s Raoul Pal posted:
It’s one bad apple,
Well maybe it’s just a few
“Banks remain strong”
It’s the evil short sellers (we are considering a ban)
Ok, now we are banning shorts
Oh, seems that didn’t work
Cut rates
That didn’t work
Panic
Change . . .
Bank of England Economist: Britons Need to Accept That They’re Poorer
2023-05-19
Speaking on a Columbia University Law School podcast, the chief economist of the Bank of England, Huw Pill, said Britons “need to accept” that they have been made poorer by the inflation perpetrated by the central bank. Price inflation today is a result of the record money creation by central banks, especially in the West, from 2020 onward. This was rationalized and justified by the mainstream narrative on covid.
The following are choice comments from the podcast.
If the cost of what you’re buying has gone up compared to what you’re selling, you’re going to be worse off.
So somehow in the UK, someone needs to accept that they’re worse off and stop trying to maintain their real spending power by bidding up prices, whether higher wages or passing the energy costs through on to customers.
The Failure of Public Works and Public Funding
2023-05-16
State projects are funded by your money, either through taxation or by inflation, most times both. Money is either taken directly from you or you lose purchasing power. The result is the same, as you will lose the ability to buy or produce as much as you wanted because of these projects. However, this is the alleged cost of living in a “civilized society.” Without these projects, we would be driving on dirt roads, living in shacks, and working for pennies a day.
However, these projects usually make the country poorer. Henry Hazlitt, in Economics in One Lesson, noted the unseen aspect of public works, such as a bridge project, writing:
If the bridge costs $1,000,000 the taxpayers will lose $1,000,000. They will have that much taken away from them which they would otherwise have spent on the