I couldn’t believe my eyes when I read this. A Federal Reserve senior official, Thomas Hoenig, said this today: “I am confident that holding rates down at artificially low levels over extended periods encourages bubbles, because it encourages debt over equity and consumption over savings.” Whaa?? Someone in the Fed who actually understands the root cause of all of our economic woes and votes for policy against the system? I didn’t know such a person existed in the Fed. He is certainly in the minority, especially with the likes of former Fed Chief Alan Greenspan making remarks recently indicating he had little to do with any sort of macro-bubbles or creating any problems, a notion that Peter Schiff fiercely counters:
Tag: Peter Schiff Page 1 of 2
Two kinds of economists exist in the world: those who know first-hand the inner-workings of the economy and those who theorize about how they think it should work and implement policies that have the opposite effect intended. That is the story of the difference between the Austrian school of economics and Keynesianism. One view is real-world, the other is from an alternate universe (yeah, okay, that was a strawman :] ).
Bottomline: we are going to have to get back to producing and saving in this country and move away from consuming and spending (particularly money we don’t have) before things get better. It could be a long slog ahead.
Dubai is just a harbinger of things to come for sovereign debt – Jeremy Warner
These are the exact things Peter Schiff and Gerald Celente were warning about a while back. The issue with this surprise Dubai news is not that they may default on $80-90 billion in debt (the news that came out today). Rather, looking into the near future, this event may be a foreshadowing of things to come with the large industrialized nations. That’s why there was a global sell-off.
In 2007 to 2008, a financial crisis came upon the private sector. And so what did governments do? They bought up the debt amounting to trillions of dollars ($15.3 trillion to be exact). So now governments around the world hold an unsustainable amount of debt. Now what? Jeremy Warner explains it well here:
“The fear is that threatened default in this tiny desert kingdom is just a harginger of things to come for government debt markets as a whole. According to new estimates by Moody’s, the credit rating agency, the total stock of sovereign debt worldwide will have risen by nearly 50 per cent between 2007 and 2010 to $15.3 trillion. The great bulk of this increase comes not from irrelevant little states like Dubai, but from the big advanced economies – America, Europe, and Japan.”
“Up until now, markets have assumed that the ruinous fiscal cost of addressing the financial and economic crisis was probably just about affordable to the major economies. That view may be about to be challenged.”
These issues here (amongst others) are exactly why the government should stay out of the free market. Let the companies crash that need to crash. Get rid of the entire category of “too big to fail” and let the market do what it needs to do. Governments, when they intervene, wind up distorting and elongating what should have been a two year economic meltdown at max, only for some form of short-term economic gain. Now, governments are looking like they can’t pay the bills. Lo and behold: Keynesianism in action!
Now we’ll have to see if the rest of Celente’s predictions and forecasting comes true, which is that governments, as a response to not being able to pay debt bills, will have to raise taxes, which will then in response cause some form of a tax revolt among the people. You think the tea parties were crazy? Just wait and see if they try to do this.
Gerald Celente discusses the current status of our economy with Russia Today. In posting this, it is not an attempt at fear-mongering, but simply to point out what needs to be heard so we elect leaders who know what they’re doing to get us out of this. Frankly, even most Republicans don’t seem to understand what to do either. As one guy said recently on a blog I read, “First we need to elect competent leaders who know how the machine of politics and economics works, and then we’ll talk about issues.”
From the Independent: The demise of the dollar:
“In the most profound financial change in recent Middle East history, Gulf Arabs are planning – along with China, Russia, Japan and France – to end dollar dealings for oil, moving instead to a basket of currencies including the Japanese yen and Chinese yuan, the euro, gold and a new, unified currency planned for nations in the Gulf Co-operation Council, including Saudi Arabia, Abu Dhabi, Kuwait and Qatar.
“Secret meetings have already been held by finance ministers and central bank governors in Russia, China, Japan and Brazil to work on the scheme, which will mean that oil will no longer be priced in dollars.
“‘These plans will change the face of international financial transactions,’ one Chinese banker said. ‘America and Britain must be very worried. You will know how worried by the thunder of denials this news will generate.'”