$100 Trillion Zimbabwe's

Who in their right mind wans to buy worthless African banknotes?

 

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That's what amazed me about the early posts. I saw those babies for sale at the NYINC at the Waldorf in 2013 for a small fraction of those up thread prices.

I reject the idea that economics is any less perfected than physics or chemistry are. There is nothing in my Keynesian training that does not explain everything I observe in economics in society. All we have in opposition is political ideology and selfishness that prevents implementing the relevant Keynesian-prescribed solutions.

The economics is flawless. The selfishness is preventing it. I consider Keynesianism to be above reproach. But it does indisputably require a sense that we're all in this together, and at the close, that's the rub for many. I get it. I may not like it, but I do get it.

Look, here's my philosophical bottom line: Keynesianism is flawless. The recent rebirth of supply side and Austrian School economics is all about justifying and mainstreaming unrepentant Adam Smithian selfishness.

 

I agree with you Funkee on spending, it is of course the issue. Frankly, I would not oppose an slight increase in the higher marginal rate IF it was accompanied by a truly balanced budget that includes a slow debt paydown component. If it means stopping the insanity of trillion dollar deficits, and trillion dollar entitlements, then you cut spending and slightly increase taxes, because, that's where the money is...

I also agree with you Rick about student debt. The government has taken a step toward wiping out debt by removing banks from the equation. A cynical eye would see the creation of a dependency block of the young and old - money is taken from the old to subsidize student debt, money from the young is taken to subsidize health care for the old. Now both blocks depend on taking money from each others pockets through Uncle Sugar.

Student debt is another government created inflationary bubble - although there is no actual commodity that is fungible. It proves the axiom that you get more of what you subsidize. Offering to fully finance the cost of education has increased the cost of education. We now have a system of vastly overpriced degree mills and a flood of graduates for whom there are no jobs in their field, and an employment system that out of laziness screens candidates without a degree for no reason whatsover. Want to be a shift supervisor of 15 people in a call center? HR says you have to have a degree. Why? Because it makes their job easier. But the job doesn't justify 4 years and $20k-$40k of debt.

A great many people would be better off if there parents just invested their college money and let them retire in 35 years. A decent fund with dividend reinvestment would let them retire a millionaire.

 

Grats, MEC2, you found our agreement zone. I +1 that whole schmeer with one caveat - implement that fiscal surplus thing AFTER we get more people back to work, not now. Then, figuratively (maybe) cut off the head of the next D or R politician that comes up with a new way to spend any new money.

And with that, I must depart. Visiting hours for my son's hospital floor are near. Back in a few hours.

 

I'm thinking this might be a great time for station identification.

This is the Paper Money section of the Coin Talk Forum.

 

I wonder how this fits into the Legal Tender Act (31 U.S. Code § 5103) seeing how this includes debts public and private. (even though it just says "debt" I think that's part of the definititon.)

Then again, I don't know much about Bitcoin. It just reminds me of the Feuchtwanger Cent and resulting Coinage Act of 1857 (which is mostly irrelevant, now).

Maybe they just haven't caught up with the times?

 

Ding! Ding! Ding! I do believe we have a winnah! Ponzi scheme is correct. (At least it is an odds on favorite.)

Of course, all money is ethereal. It doesn't physically exist really. It's a concept, like a score in a sport. You can show me an action that results in a point on the scoreboard, but you can't show me "a point". Neither can you show me a dollar. You can show me a token that represents a dollar, but the vast majority of M2 dollars are as solid as Bitcoin are. More than 85% typically, of the U.S. Money supply is without any physical manifestation, paper, metal or otherwise. It exists only on computers.

I know that really creeps out some people, but it's true nonetheless.

By the way, had you stayed in Chicago after the ANA, we could have hung out, you could have had my extra ticket to the Cubs game on Sunday, and then gone to the Chicago Fed with me on Monday, where this all is explained in their museum. EVERY Austrian Fool needs to go to a Federal Reserve Bank and tour the displays. Free education. They won't bite, nor will they confiscate your PMs. But you will learn something. Like why any PM backed currency is a sure fire recipe for creating human misery.

 

All debt is money, and all money is debt. They are synonymous. When total debt in the economy rises, so does the money supply. When total debt falls, so does the money supply.

All macroeconomics is counterintuitive. What households should never do, governments not only should, they MUST! And vice versa. Public thrift and private spending are partners, as are public spending and private thrift.

If that sounds all "Alice in Wonderland" to you, it's okay. It's not supposed to make so-called "common sense". Using "common sense" in macroeconomics will steer you wrong almost every time.

 

Mr. Bellman,

I like reading your posts but I for one do disagree with you at times. I am no fan of the US FED. Not one bit. However I am not an economist, I am an engineer, therefore I think, I adapt, I learn, I fix.

That being said, I can not see how anyone believes in Keynesian theory and can be open about it. For this one thing alone I congratulate you most.

Today's money is vaporware. I only ask you to explain how I can buy a gallon of gasoline for $.25c today but have to use 50 year old money to do it? Inflation is the evil of those who try to save. I am a debtor, of this I have no choice so therefore I am a pawn to the games that the uber wealthy play.

I am not griping because I am provided for but the nonsense of actually believing the government can create wealth with a printing press is a joke.

 

1) they don't use a printing press, and the government or even the Fed doesn't do the vast majority of the money creating. Your local bank does. And it isn't done with a printing press, it's done with accounting entries.

2) you can't buy a gallon of gas with a 50-year-old quarter. Try it sometime. You can buy it with the dollars you can get IF you can find someone to buy the quarter and IF he offers you its present market value and IF, and IF, and ... Point is - how much of the increase since 1972 in the price of gasoline is because of inflation, and how much is because it is fundamentally more expensive to get and refine? I don't know, and neither does anyone else.

3) I know most people believe when prices rise, that's inflation. Well maybe it is and maybe it isn't. Some prices rise during deflation. Some prices fall during inflation. It is never clear at first glance whether gold or silver rise or fall based on their own fundamentals or the dollar's. Anybody who says they know for sure lies. I do know this - I've read here that gas and food and medicines are still going up in price. I don't see it. They are all dropping here, and I buy a lot of all 3. Gasoline isn't about 60 cents below where it was 3 months ago where you live? It sure is here. The station managers are making sure they know where their big 2's are for the big first digit in the price of regular. My grocery bill is way below last year's. My electricity bill is too. My tech is cheaper. I don't have cable or satellite TV. I don't go to movies. Where is my inflation? Oh yeah, my monthly Amtrak ticket went up a buck from $170 to $171. Whoopee!

 

Gasoline is more expensive because our dollar is worth less. When I starting working in1972 I could buy a gallon of gas for 35 cents.

 

Give us a prediction if our elected officials fail in March of next year to yet again to increase the debt limit on time. Am i a fool to believe the USD is back by nothing but the faith and credit of the US government? I wonder how long it would take for another down grade in credit and how the markets would react.

 

How do you know that's why? How? Didn't the easy oil wells dry up? Aren't today's deep water wells more expensive in terms of men and machines? Aren't there higher taxes on it? Doesn't your state mandate more expensive low volatility fuels? Aren't prices controlled now by commodity traders because fewer brands use their own ground to tank infrastructure? Didn't a Wall Street brokerage firm just buy up almost all the gasoline storage tank construction infrastructure?!?

 

If they raise the debt ceiling on time and without noise, our credit rating will not only be steady, it might improve.

If somebody in Congress gets all "we have to stop the debt", our credit rating WILL suffer, perhaps badly.

Debt limit raising time is the absolute worst time to have that discussion. It needs to happen at budget season.

 

Abolish the FED



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L. Randall Wray is a Professor of Economics at the University of Missouri-Kansas City and Senior Scholar at the Levy Economics Institute of Bard College, NY. More ›
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Time to Abolish the Fed? Maybe Andrew Jackson Was Right, After All
Author: L. Randall Wray · November 23rd, 2011 · Comments (275) Share This Print 14 68
There is a growing movement to reform, reign-in, or simply shut down the Fed. And this is no longer limited to the crazy right conspiracy theorists. Along with Presidential candidate Ron Paul, Denis Kucinich and Bernie Sanders are harshly criticizing the Fed and demanding Congressional action.
Very reasonable analysts including Chris Whalen at The Institutional Risk Analysis are outraged at the Fed’s deliberate obfuscation and possibly illegal activities. It is not just what the Fed did to bail-out the banks, nor its QE 1, QE 2, and almost inevitable Q 3 that raises hackles. And it is not just that the Fed abhors transparency and sees itself as accountable to no one.
It looks like the Fed continues to leak information about its monetary policy actions to insiders—something that concerned Henry B. Gonzalez as House Banking Committee Chair back in 1993. He called for an audit of the Fed—and eventually forced Chairman Greenspan to open the “secrets of the temple” a bit. And while it appears that a huge number of favorite insiders are privy to the most intimate details of the Fed, Chairman Bernanke doesn’t believe the Congress has any right to know anything the Fed doesn’t want to tell it.
Last year, Senator Sanders finally pushed through an amendment requiring an audit of the Fed’s bail-out activities (it passed the Senate 96-0!)—a partial victory. But the Fed continues to operate mostly behind closed doors insisting that its independence gives it impunity to do whatever it damn well pleases while answering to no one.
I’m going to write on a lot of the details in later posts. Here I want to focus on President Andrew Jackson’s veto of legislation to renew the charter of the Second Bank of the United States in 1832. There is an excellent piece (“Ignorance is Confidence: Fedtalk or Newspeak? Andrew Jackson on Repealing a Central Bank”, February 14, 2011) from The Institutional Risk Analyst that briefly looks at today’s Fed in light of Jackson’s veto, and it includes a copy of Jackson’s speech. The speech is fascinating for two reasons. First, it demonstrates that the intelligence of either voters or our leaders has diminished remarkably over the years (my bet is both). I cannot imagine a leader in America today who would or could give such an address before Congress.
Second, the speech makes it clear that “Old Hickory” got a bad rap. I’d always thought he was on the wrong side of the debate, that he’d kept America in the dark ages by forestalling the creation of a central bank. Surely the US needed one? Our much more checkered financial history—littered with financial crises and a depression every generation—must have been caused in part by our failure to “modernize”? We finally created the Fed in 1913, ending the cycle of speculative booms and busts. Right?
Well, maybe not. After the Global Financial Crisis that began in 2007, and the $29 trillion dollar Fed scandalous bailout, and the $2 trillion Quantitative Diarrhea, and the coming financial crisis (starting next week or the week after next), perhaps it is time to revisit Andy Jackson.
The basis of his objection to the US Bank was its “exclusive privilege of banking under the authority of the General Government, a monopoly of its favor and support” which accorded to its owners some $17 million as the “present value of the monopoly”. Those owners consisted of an elite aristocracy of Americans and foreigners. Jackson argued that it would be far more just if Congress were to “create and sell twenty-eight millions of stock, incorporating the purchasers with all the powers and privileges secured in this act”—that is, sell the stock to the American people. “If our Government must sell monopolies, it would seem to be its duty to take nothing less than their full value”.
He also recognized that the set-up ensured a net transfer of wealth from the West to the Eastern aristocrats. Further, “Of the twenty-five directors of this bank five are chosen by the Government and twenty by the citizen stockholders” (of whom a third were foreigners). Thus, “The entire control of the institution would necessarily fall into the hands of a few citizen stockholders, and the ease with which the object would be accomplished would be a temptation to designing men to secure that control in their own hands…There is danger that a president and directors would then be able to elect themselves from year to year…It is easy to conceive that great evils to our country and its institutions might flow from such a concentration of power in the hands of a few men irresponsible to the people.” (I do love the phrase “designing men”—worthy of a Veblen or a Galbraith.)
His words near the end of the speech are worth quoting even though they go beyond the specific issues at hand:
“If we can not at once, in justice to interest vested under improvident legislation, make our Government what it ought to be we can at least take a stand against all new grants of monopolies and exclusive privileges, against any prostitution of our Government to the advancement of the few at the expense of the many, and in favor of compromise and gradual reform in our code of laws and system of political economy. I have now done my duty to my country. If sustained by my fellow citizens, I shall be grateful and happy; if not, I shall find in the motives which impel me ample grounds for contentment and peace.” (Can you just imagine a Bush or even an Obama uttering anything like this? Railing against prostitution of our Government Sachs to Wall Street?)
And with that, Old Hickory forestalled the creation of the central bank monopoly for eight decades.
To be sure, the Fed’s set-up was somewhat different. It is owned by its member banks, not by individuals. Its Board of Governors is chosen by the President but private banks elect the Board of Directors of each Fed Bank, which then choose the Presidents (who must be approved by the BOG). Five of these Presidents sit on the Federal Open Market Committee, which sets monetary policy. A US Appeals Court ruled that the Federal Reserve Banks are “independent, privately owned and locally controlled corporations”. While the Fed is not operated for profit, it generates a huge revenue flow that finances its far-flung operations across the country (most of them wrong-headed, but that is a topic for another day). The banks that own the Fed get a maximum return of 6%, with the rest of the profits going to the Treasury; in 2010, the Federal Reserve made a profit of $82 billion and transferred $79 billion to Uncle Sam.
So this is not quite the blatant monopoly power that the US Bank was handing over to a handful of rich white guys. But there are at least three problems with the arrangements that would raise the ire of Andy Jackson.
First, the Fed continues to operate mostly in secret—usually only dribbling out information that it decides to disclose. While one can concede that some deliberations need to be done in secret (discussing details of a bank examination, for example, since disclosure would generate a run on a troubled bank), there is no reason to conceal ANY information after the fact. Yet the Fed continues to claim that it is not subject to “freedom of information” laws.
Second, the Fed allows favored insiders to sit-in on its deliberations. This apparently includes local businessmen as well as reporters and foreigners. I’m not sure because the Fed does not release lists of attendees. That then raises two further issues: it is a well-known secret that insiders trade on the information and it means that the veil of secrecy really only prevents American voters and taxpayers from knowing what their central bank is up to.
And, third, the Fed’s activities—especially those undertaken in the aftermath of the crisis—expose it to possible losses. I am not worried about the potential reduction of the portion of profits it pays to Treasury. While that could be a minor political issue (and is almost certain to happen in the next couple of years), the bigger problem would be massive losses on its portfolio of toxic waste assets and loans to bailed-out banks.
Over the course of the bail-out the Fed provided a cumulative total of $29 trillion of funds to troubled banks. (My Graduate Research Assistants Andy Felkerson and Nicola Matthews are finishing up their study of the Fed’s data, so the results to demonstrate this figure will be released soon.) To be sure, that is the total since the bail-out began; the amount outstanding at any point in time was much less—on the order of $2-4 trillion—since banks would borrow funds and then repay them. Still, the Fed was lending against just about any trash banks had, so the potential for losses was significant.
Further, the Fed also bought a lot of the trash. We do not know what, if any, losses the Fed has already absorbed, much less what it could incur over the life of the toxic waste. It is probable that the Fed is engaged in the same “extend and pretend” accounting that is rampant among the banks. And the Fed has apparently been pushing some of the trash onto the GSEs (Fannie and Freddie)—which still puts Uncle Sam on the hook. So there is still an unknown but reasonably high probability for big losses. Are we going to let the Fed go bankrupt? Will we ask its member banks to kick in more capital? Or will the Treasury be asked to cover the losses? I think we know the answer.
I must admit that I’ve long been skeptical of Jackson’s followers, who insist we’d be better off without a central bank. Surely we need someone to set the overnight interest rate, we need check clearing, and we need a lender of last resort. But maybe it’s time to think about an alternative to the Fed.
Why don’t we all do that over the next few weeks.
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Uh huh. Do you think too, or just cut and paste?

 

No, you are correct. The dollar is based on the faith and credit of the US Gov't.

 

Did you not see that your cut and paste included about 500 lines of gibberish header-style metadata?

Sorry, it's pointless HTML code.