Saturday, October 11, 2008

Banks and fictitious capital

"The banks themselves were doing business on capitals, three-fourths of which were fictitious; and to extend their profit they furnished fictitious capital to every man"

- Thomas Jefferson, June 1819

"Some mechanism has got to be in place that restricts the amount of money which is produced - either a gold standard or currency board or something of that nature - because unless you do that all of history suggests that inflation will take hold with very deleterious effects on economic activity."

- Alan Greenspan, October 2007

The root cause of the economic mess is not a bunch of bad mortgages.
The root cause is an uncontrolled, inflationary monetary policy.

We need sound money.

Tim White

6 comments:

Anonymous said...

what would your reaction be if McCain endorsed the gold standard?

Anonymous said...

In short, I'd be extremely excited. However, I've been educating myself on this a fair bit over the past year or so and have a somewhat different feeling now.

I think "a gold standard" is an easy to understand sound bite. But now being better educated, my concern is more an elimination of fiat money and a return to sound money.

That's not necessarily a gold standard though. It's more a matter of simply stopping Banker Bailout Bush and Printing Press Pelosi from making more money out of thin air.

Anonymous said...

Printing Press Pelosi


You've got to be kidding. This is a Bush created problem and a Bush created solution and if it had been left to the Republicans in the house and senate, nothing would have been done except to stand around with their finger........

Anonymous said...

yo, did a single Democrats suggest reining in Fannie Mae & Freddie Mac?

One?

Blame Bush all you want but the Democrats were fat and happy on the same damm train

Anonymous said...

Bush created solution

That particular $150 billion stimulus package was a "solution" proposed by Pelosi, not Bush.

Regardless, while it seems Bush and the GOP will get tagged with the blame for this mess in November, I strongly disagree that this was created solely by Bush. He's partly, but not exclusively, to blame.

Dodd and Shelby and Frank and Bachus (sp??) are all partly responsible. As are the overwhelming majority of Presidents and members of Congress who have served during the past few decades... a period in which almost no one understood, let alone challenged, our inherently flawed fiat monetary policy.

Anonymous said...

As long as we have fiat money, we'll have politicians who turn on the printing presses... it's much more politically palatable than visibly raising taxes. So instead, they give us the hidden inflation tax by inflating the money supply.

And the MSM is complicit... not intentionally though. Most political reporters have no understanding of economics.

As an example of this, look at any reporting on Greenspan or Bernanke. For decades, their words have simply been accepted by the MSM and our elected officials. And it's not because they agreed... it's because they didn't understand the monetary policy that has been handed over to the central bank in four installments - 1913, 1931, 1971 and 2008.