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Do You Believe in Magic?

March 30, 2021

Do You Believe in Magic?

The people pretending to run the world’s financial affairs do. The more layers of abstract game-playing they add to the existing armatures of unreality they’ve already constructed, the more certain it becomes that they will blow up all the support systems of a sunsetting hyper-tech economy that now has no safe lane to continue running in.

Virtually all the big nations are doing this now in desperation because they don’t understand that the hyper-tech economy is hostage to the deteriorating economics of energy, basically fossil fuels, and oil especially. The macro mega-system can’t grow anymore. We’re now in the de-growth phase of a dynamic that pulsates through history, as everything in the universe pulsates. We attempted to compensate for de-growth with debt, borrowing from the future.

But debt only works in the youthful growth phases of economic pulsation, when the prospect of being paid back is statistically favorable. Now in the elder de-growth phase, the prospect of paying back debts, or even servicing the interest, is statistically dismal. The amount of racked-up debt worldwide has entered the realm of the laughable. So, the roughly twenty-year experiment in Central Bank credit magic, as a replacement for true capital formation, has come to its grievous end.

Hence, America under the pretend leadership of Joe Biden ventures into the final act of this melodrama, which will end badly and probably pretty quickly. They are about to call in the financial four horsemen of apocalypse: 1) Modern Monetary Theory (MMT), 2) a command economy, 3) Universal Basic Income (UBI, “helicopter” money for the people), and 4) the “Build Back Better” infrastructure scheme.

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money, monetary theory, modern monetary theory, debt, money printing, james howard kunstler, clusterfuck nation, magic, degrowth, growth

Monetary Consequence of Tariffs

August 24, 2018

MONETARY CONSEQUENCE OF TARIFFS

Last week in Monetary Paradigm Reset, we talked about the challenge of explaining a new paradigm. We said:

“The hard part of accepting this paradigm shift, was that people had to rethink their entire view of cosmology, theology, and philosophy. In the best case, people take time to grapple with these challenges to their idea of man’s place in the universe. Some never accept the new idea.”

We were talking about the fact that money is the unit of account, and the assertion that irredeemable paper currencies are money.

Monetary Relativity

This week, Turkey provides an opportunity to discuss this in a way most people can relate to. Their currency, the lira, has been falling for years, but the rate of its plunge accelerated dramatically this week. It closed last week at 19.6 cents, but on Friday it was 15.5. This may not seem like a lot, but those 3.1 pennies are about 21 percent. In a week!

However, if the lira is money, then this is just our American bias speaking, isn’t it? To a Turk, the dollar closed last week at ₺5.08 and this Friday at ₺6.43, or a gain of 27%. Those who hold dollars in Turkey just got rich, right?

Which graph is objective?

Most people can see the principle clearly when it comes to the toilet-paper currency of a failing dictatorship. They wouldn’t say that the dollar is up 27%. The theory of currency relativity is not applied to this case.

It’s only with the dollar (and other major currencies) that things somehow become less clear. Did gold go down this week, or did the dollar go up? Everyone knows that the Federal Reserve strives to devalue the dollar at two percent per year. And they know that gold has been prized as money for thousands of years. Yet, when it comes to gold and the irredeemable dollar—they say that it’s gold which moves.

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The Dollar Dilemma: Where to From Here?

June 23, 2018

The Dollar Dilemma: Where to From Here?

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 Introduction: Where We Are 

It’s a fallacy to believe the US has a free market economy. The economy is run by a conglomerate of individuals and special interests, in and out of government, including the Deep State, which controls central economic planning.

Rigging the economy is required to prevent market forces from demanding a halt to the mistakes that planners continuously make. This deceptive policy can last only for a limited time. Ultimately, the market proves more powerful than government manipulation of economic events. The longer the process lasts, the greater the bubble that always bursts. The planners in charge have many tools to perpetuate confidence in an unstable system, but common sense should tell us that grave dangers lie ahead.

Their policies strive to convince the unknowing that the dollar is strong and its status as the world’s reserve currency is secure, no matter how many new dollars they create of out of thin air. It is claimed that our foreign debt is always someone else’s fault and never related to our own monetary and economic mismanagement.

Official government reports inevitably claim inflation is low and we must work harder to increase it, claiming price increases somehow mystically indicate economic growth.

The Consumer Price Index is the statistic manipulated to try to prove this point just as they use misleading GDP numbers to do the same. Many people now recognizing these reports are nothing more than propaganda. Anybody who pays the bills to maintain a household knows the truth about inflation.

Ever since the Great Depression, controlling the dollar price of gold and deciding who gets to hold gold was official policy. This advanced the Federal Reserve’s original goal of demonetizing precious metals, which was fully achieved in August 1971.

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Modern Monetary Theory and Strong Towns

January 17, 2018

MODERN MONETARY THEORY AND STRONG TOWNS

Last year I read Debt: The First 5,000 Years by David Graeber. I found it compelling and included it in an article I wrote about Puerto Rico (“The Spooky Nature of Debt“), mentioned it in a podcast and included it in the list of books I published in December. Apparently, this was a signal to many of you that I am, or at the very least might be, interested in a strain of economic thinking called Modern Monetary Theory.

“If you discover a magic pill that is said to solve some complex and ancient problem human societies continually struggle with, you might want to pause before taking it.”

The reality is that I’m a deep skeptic of the theory. In fact, I think we should all be reflexively skeptical of any theory that purports to remove burdensome economic constraints and make our lives instantly easier if only society can find the required cultural enlightenment. If you discover a magic pill that is said to solve some complex and ancient problem human societies continually struggle with, you might want to pause before taking it.

My skepticism aside, my goal here is not to convince the passionate supporters of endless federal money printing that this is a bad idea – you’ve got your thing and you really believe it and I don’t want to quarrel over it in this piece – but to point out to you, and especially those sympathetic to the ends if not the means of what you advocate for, that Modern Monetary Theory is not going to solve the problems we are trying to address at Strong Towns.

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Is Washington tacitly operating under a new monetary theory?

December 27, 2017

Is Washington tacitly operating under a new monetary theory?

In 2002 when soon-to-be-dismissed U.S. Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill warned then Vice President Dick Cheney that the Bush administration’s tax cuts would drive up deficits and threaten the health of the economy, Cheney famously answered: “You know, Paul, Reagan proved deficits don’t matter.”

In the wake of the recently approved federal tax cut,voices concerned about the damage that deficits will do are rising again.

What’s curious is that since Cheney’s rebuke of O’Neill, growing federal government deficits seem not of have mattered. In fact, the largest deficits ever boosted the economy after the 2008-09 recession, exceeding $1 trillion annually for four years.

All of this suggests that the federal government has for a long time been operating under an unspoken monetary theory, namely, that government spending does not need to be backed by revenues and that the debt issued to fill the gap between spending and revenues will have little effect now or in the future.

But isn’t there some level of federal debt which would cripple the federal government and the U.S. economy?  A common metric for measuring this debt is the ratio of federal debt to annual gross domestic product (GDP). When one looks at a graph of this, the growth in debt seems perilous, rising from a low of around 30 percent of GDP in the early 1980s to more than 100 percent of GDP today.

Seemingly more perilous is the rapid growth in Japanese government debt. That debt has soared from a low of around 40 percent of GDP in 1990 to almost 200 percent of GDP now. Yet, the oft-prophesied demise of Japanese government finance has not occurred.

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Four Reasons Central Banks are Wrong to Fight Deflation

June 23, 2017

Four Reasons Central Banks are Wrong to Fight Deflation

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The word “deflation” can be defined in various ways. According to the most widely accepted definition today, deflation is a sustained decrease of the price level. Older authors have often used the expression “deflation” to denote a decreasing money supply, and some contemporary authors use it to characterize a decrease of the inflation rate. All of these definitions are acceptable, depending on the purpose of the analysis. None of them, however, lends itself to justifying an artificial increase of the money supply.

The harmful character of deflation is today one of the sacred dogmas of monetary policy. The champions of the fight against deflation usually present six arguments to make their case.1 One, in their eyes it is a matter of historical experience that deflation has negative repercussions on aggregate production and, therefore, on the standard of living. To explain this presumed historical record, they hold, two, that deflation incites the market participants to postpone buying because they speculate on ever lower prices. Furthermore, they consider, three, that a declining price level makes it more difficult to service debts contracted at a higher price level in the past. These difficulties threaten to entail, four, a crisis within the banking industry and thus a dramatic curtailment of credit. Five, they claim that deflation in conjunction with “sticky prices” results in unemployment. And finally, six, they consider that deflation might reduce nominal interest rates to such an extent that a monetary policy of “cheap money,” to stimulate employment and production, would no longer be possible, because the interest rate cannot be decreased below zero.

However, theoretical and empirical evidence substantiating these claims is either weak or lacking altogether.2 First, in historical fact, deflation has had no clear negative impact on aggregate production.

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Why We Need a Recession

January 20, 2016

Why We Need a Recession 

Why We Need a Recession

According to the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER), a recession is defined as a “significant decline in economic activity spread across the economy, lasting more than a few months.” Often, this is understood as two consecutive quarters of negative economic growth as measured by a country’s GDP.

Public opinion is generally quite simple in regard to recession: upswings are generally welcomed, recessions are to be avoided. The “Austrians” are however at odds with this general consensus — we regard recessions as healthy and necessary. Economic downturns only correct the aberrations and excesses of a boom. The benefits of recessions include:

  • Sclerotic structures in the labor market are broken up and labor costs decline.
  • Productivity and competitiveness increase.
  • Misallocations are corrected and unprofitable investments abandoned, written off, or liquidated.
  • Government mismanagement of the economy is exposed.
  • Investors and entrepreneurs who were taking too great risks suffer losses and prices adjust to reflect consumer preferences.
  • Recessions also allow a restructuring of production processes.

At the end of the corrective process, the foundation for a renewed upswing is more stable and healthy. We thus see deflationary corrections as a precondition for growth in prosperity that is sustainable in the long term. Ludwig von Mises understood this when he observed:

The return to monetary stability does not generate a crisis. It only brings to light the malinvestments and other mistakes that were made under the hallucination of the illusory prosperity created by the easy money.

Can the Government Save Face?

However, in addition to leading to true temporary hardship for the malinvestment-affected areas of the economy, an economic recession in the near future would represent a harsh loss of face for central bankers. Their controversial monetary policy measures were justified as an appropriate means to nurse the economy back to health. That is, their efforts to end or avoid helpful recessions were claimed to contribute to the eagerly awaited self-sustaining recovery.

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Cyclical Changes in Business Conditions

June 20, 2015

Cyclical Changes in Business Conditions

The Role of Interest Rates

In our economic system, times of good business commonly alternate more or less regularly with times of bad business. Decline follows economic upswing, upswing follows decline, and so on. The attention of economic theory has quite understandably been greatly stimulated by this problem of cyclical changes in business conditions. In the beginning, several hypotheses were set forth, which could not stand up under critical examination. However, a theory of cyclical fluctuations was finally developed which fulfilled the demands legitimately expected from a scientific solution to the problem. This is the circulation-credit theory, usually called the monetary theory of the trade cycle. This theory is generally recognized by science. All cyclical policy measures, which are taken seriously, proceed from the reasoning which lies at the root of this theory.

According to the circulation-credit theory (monetary theory of the trade cycle), cyclical changes in business conditions stem from attempts to reduce artificially the interest rates on loans through measures of banking policy — expansion of bank credit by the issue or creation of additional fiduciary media (that is, banknotes and/or checking deposits not covered 100 percent by gold). On a market, which is not disturbed by the interference of such an “inflationist” banking policy, interest rates develop at which the means are available to carry out all the plans and enterprises that are initiated. Such unhampered market interest rates are known as “natural” or “static” interest rates. If these interest rates were adhered to, then economic development would proceed without interruption — except for the influence of natural cataclysms or political acts such as war, revolution, and the like. The fact that economic development follows a wavy pattern must be attributed to the intervention of the banks through their interest rate policy.

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