Economically, the 11 years since the Global Financial Crisis of 2008-09 have been one relatively coherent era of modest growth, rising wealth/income inequality and coordinated central bank stimulus every time a crisis threatened to disrupt the domestic…
Central banks pretend all these benefits come at no cost to anyone
World Domination–it has a nice ring, doesn’t it? Here’s how to achieve it in 5 steps: 1. Turn everything into a commodity that can be traded on the global market:land, leases on land, options to purchase land, houses, buildings, rooms…
Everyone who wants to reduce wealth and income inequality with more regulations and taxes is missing the key dynamic: central banks’ monopoly on creating and issuing money widens wealth inequality, as those with access to newly issued money can always outbid the…
Over the past 20 years, central banks have run a gigantic real-world experiment called “trickle-down.” The basic idea is Keynesian (i.e. the mystical and comically wrong-headed cargo-cult that has entranced the economics profession for decades): monetary stimulus (lowering interest rates…
Take a quick glance at these charts of the Federal Reserve balance sheet and bank credit in the U.S. Notice what happened to bank credit after the Fed “tapered” and stopped expanding its balance sheet? Bank credit exploded higher: Now…
One person’s bubble is another person’s “fair market value.” What is clearly an outrageously overvalued asset perched at nosebleed levels of central-bank fueled speculative euphoria is to the owner an asset at “fair market value.” But beneath the euphoric confidence…
Ah, the good old days, when a simple, completely empty promise to do whatever it takes could move the world. It was fun being a central banker back in the good old days–back then playing Master of the Universe was…
The Keynesian gods have failed, and as a result we’re in the eye of a global financial hurricane. The Keynesian god of growth has failed. The Keynesian god of borrowing from the future to fund today’s consumption has failed. The…
If we step back and look at what’s happened since the Global Financial Crisis of 2008-09, it’s easy to see that the global leadership has chosen to do more of what’s failed spectacularly. Since the Global Financial Meltdown, central bankers…
It’s difficult for well-meaning pundits to abandon the fantasy that meaningful reform is possible. Indeed, a critical function of the punditry and corporate media is to foster the fantasy that the status quo could be reformed if only we all…
The tug of war between Bull and Bear has rarely been so clearly matched–and the stakes have rarely been so high. Bulls are confident that central banks have their back in 2016. After all,whatever it takes has successfully pushed equities…
If we don’t change the way money is created and distributed, we will never change anything. This is the core message of my book A Radically Beneficial World: Automation, Technology and Creating Jobs for All. The Panama Papers offer damning…
To say that the future of money is blockchain-based crypto-currencies and payment platforms is to state the obvious nowadays. If this wasn’t the case, then why are Goldman Sachs et al. (i.e. the global too big to fail banks) rushing…
The basic idea of a balance sheet recession (attributed to Richard Koo) has been well-publicized: when the liability (debt) side of household and business ledgers reach danger heights, stakeholders respond by reducing debt and increasing savings rather than increasing spending…