The Economy

Nobody in a free society should be an appointed price fixer over the most important cost (the cost of borrowing) there is in a market econonmy. That goes for Alan Greenspan, Ben Bernanke, Janet Yellen, Jay Powell. ... or Donald Trump. But as with anything Donald Trump, if given that kind of broad power, you could probably count on him to create even bigger distortions than the people who have been given the power have over the last few decades. They monetize enormous amounts of debt to enable government spending, and the schemes they use take us from debt crisis to debt crisis, make the rich richer and create a bigger and mire more people over time in the underclass. ... and what they do requires them to intervene in the debt markets in increasingly more dictatorial ways to keep it all propped up.

What he'd do, if he could, was put his foot so hard on the gas wiht the monetary stimulus to try to create an instant boom that we'd just get the accumulated debt crisis out of the way rather than millions of people being dragged through prolonged economic misery.

Regardless, borrowers and lenders -- voluntarily transacting with each other -- should be setting interest rates. Not a price-fixing czar. What do you think people -- Jay Powell, Donald Trump or otherwise -- do with that power?

 

I think you are trying to talk about the Panic of 1857, but who knows. .... If so, saying that the SS Central America sinking CAUSED the panic is like saying that the extreme chemo regimen they gave to the guy with stage 5 cancer is what caused his death. ... while ignoring the cancer. Do you have any clue about the boom / bust that occured in the 1850s . ... and why it happened. ... and how it had a lot of people praying that a ship full of gold might bail them out from the speculative ferver they had fallen into?

And it still has zero to do with a market -- not an appointed price fixer that picks winners and losers -- deciding how much things cost via voluntary exchange (for example, the cost of money, which is the most important price there is) in a market ecnonmy.

If your idea is that a central bank has prevented financial panics. ... it's even more absurd than your"ship sinking caused a depression" attempt at history. It's Kafkaesque, like telling me that the arsonist is the fighfighter.

The actual depression -- the one that devastated this country for more than a decade -- was so much more extreme than past boom / bust cycles because of the reinstatement of central banking in this country. Central banks exist to create monetary distortions that pull demand from the future into the present (corruptly, to the benefit of a few). Over and over again they have caused much worse financial crises than whatever curated history from past centuries you are going to try to give me. It's how actual cause and effect works. Since their creation in 1913, they have made the boom-bust cycles way more extreme, holding back innovation in the process because of the malinvestment they spur, and leaving much worse financial crises in their wake. They then use the messes they create as the rationale to take even more extreme price-fixing powers, which is great for the politicians they work for, because it allows them to keep running up debts that the central bank monetizes and inflates away at the expense of the underclass that keeps getting bigger as it sees its wages decline over time in real terms.

The only reason to argue FOR that. ... is ignorance about what it is, what it does and how it does it. But I get why it happens. A relatively small group of rich people get richer exponentially because they are the ones who have the assets to borrow way too cheaply against, and the monetary inflation blows up the asset values of the things they can put all their wealth into. The perfect symmetry is that politicians then use populist rhetoric to put the focus on those rich people who just get richer due to the central banking regimen those politicians rely on, too. And the losers are everyone else. ... Working stiffs (the majority of people) get destroyed, as their wages decline in real terms and prices of the things they need to live keep going up. Politicians pretend to be Santa Claus and run up massive debts ostensibly to help those working stiffs (who will hopefully vote for you if you promise enough free stuff), which they have a central bank to monetize.