That great economist, Ben S. Bernanke

For your amusement, here’s Bernanke a couple of years ago doing his best to downplay our problems:

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To the dismay of many a fair-minded observer, Bernanke the Fool has been nominated for another term as Fed chairman. My comment is, so long as there is a Fed, who cares who runs it? The chairman, like the US President, is nothing but a figurehead. He provides lip service for policies that exclusively benefit the cartel of big banks.  Thus it has been since the Morgan, Schiff, Warburg and Rockefeller syndicates conspired in 1913 to draft the Federal Reserve Act and ram it through Congress two days before Christmas.

I’m a little bit surprised that Bernanke was nominated again, since there is such low public opinion towards him and his employer. I thought that he might be thrown to the dogs to satisfy the public’s urge for ‘change,’ but I guess the logic is that by keeping him on they can better preserve the fiction that the Fed saved the world. He is also very lucky that the nomination schedule coincided with the likely peak in Wave 2 sentiment (2nd waves are characterized by the near consensus that the old trend is back to stay, in this case, the Great American Bull Market).

Along the same line, I’m also surprised that the campaign to audit the Fed hasn’t found more support from the White House, since it would be the perfect PR opportunity for them to pretend that they were independent of the bankers. I half expect to see the audit happen, with the results decided in advance of course, something akin to past Congressional “investigations.” Maybe they will have to do something like this once mood sours again with the next wave of foreclosures, bank failures and panic selling in the markets.

The real campaign should be to end the Fed, not audit it. We already know what it does, and they are actually surprisingly transparent for such a sinister institution. It’s all right there on their website.

Ron Paul sums up the crisis in 3 minutes

(thanks again to zerohedge for finding this video)

I remember when I first discovered a speech by Ron Paul back in boom-time 2005, and was shocked that a Congressman was so eloquently warning of the dangers of fractional reserve lending, the Federal Reserve system, and welfare/warfare deficit spending. It was the first time that I could fully respect a standing politician.

Dr. Paul is still the nation’s strongest voice for an honest monetary and banking system, and he delivered a zinger in front of Bernanke and Frank yesterday. If, like me, you haven’t heard him speak in a while, have a listen and you’ll remember why his campaign was so exciting for so many of us.

Money quote: “I would suggest that the problems we have faced so far are nothing compared to what it will be like when the world not only rejects our debt, but our dollar as well. That’s when we’ll witness political turmoil that will be to no one’s benefit.”

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Now wouldn’t it be great to have Peter Schiff to cause the same trouble in the Senate?

A good rant

This is why I love America:

 

 

Thanks to Mish for sharing the link.

Two contemporary libertarian greats talk about the crisis.

Mises Foundation founder Lew Rockwell interviewed blogger Mike “Mish” Shedlock on his podcast series:

Link here.

Topics include bailouts, ‘stimulus’ plans, the benefits of deflation, and Mish’s campaigns to end bailouts and abolish the Fed.

Mish is really pushing hard politically. I’m 100% behind him, but I worry a bit about how the gangsters might respond to him now that he is getting so popular.

Also check out Lew Rockwell’s podcast archives and look for Jim Rogers’ interview yesterday.

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PS — Sorry again for the lack of posts. I’ve been a bit unsettled of late, having been in the middle of a transoceanic move.

A crash course on the banking cartel.

If you haven’t read this book:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Watch this video, a lecture by G. Edward Griffin:

Click here to watch.

Real credit vs. fake credit.

The essence of why bailouts will only deepen our problems is that real credit cannot be created out of thin air. This counterfeit operation is what caused the bubble to begin with, and by trying to put out a fire with gasoline, Bernanke, Congress and Obama are going to burn down the whole city.

Frank Shostak, the Chief Economist at M.F. Global, knows a thing or two about economics, which is not something you can say about many of today’s economists. The Mises Institute website publishes this essay of his on credit, which illustrates the critical identity between savings and investment, and the proper role of banks in an honest system.

Central-bank policy makers have said that the key for economic growth is a smooth flow of credit. For them (in particular, for Bernanke) it is credit that provides the foundation for economic growth and raises individuals’ living standards. From this perspective, it makes a lot of sense for the central bank to make sure that credit flows again.

Following the teachings of Friedman and Keynes, it is an almost-unanimous view among experts that if lenders are unwilling to lend, then it is the duty of the government and the central bank to keep the flow of lending going. …

It is true that credit is the key for economic growth. However, one must make a distinction between good credit and bad credit. It is good credit that makes real economic growth possible and thus improves people’s lives and well-being. False credit, however, is an agent of economic destruction and leads to economic impoverishment.

Good Credit versus Bad Credit

There are two kinds of credit: that which would be offered in a market economy with sound money and banking (good credit); and that which is made possible only through a system of central banking, artificially low interest rates, and fractional reserves (bad credit).

Banks cannot expand good credit as such. All that they can do in reality is to facilitate the transfer of a given pool of savings from savers (lenders) to borrowers. To understand why, we must first understand how good credit comes to be and the function it serves.

Consider the case of a baker who bakes ten loaves of bread. Out of his stock of real wealth (ten loaves of bread), the baker consumes two loaves and saves eight. He lends his eight remaining loaves to the shoemaker in return for a pair of shoes in one week’s time. Note that credit here is the transfer of “real stuff,” i.e., eight saved loaves of bread from the baker to the shoemaker in exchange for a future pair of shoes.

Also, observe that the amount of real savings determines the amount of available credit. If the baker had saved only four loaves of bread, the amount of credit would have only been four loaves instead of eight.

Note that the saved loaves of bread provide support to the shoemaker, i.e., they sustain him while he is busy making shoes. This means that credit, by sustaining the shoemaker, gives rise to the production of shoes and therefore to the formation of more real wealth. This is a path to real economic growth.

Money and Credit

The introduction of money does not alter the essence of what credit is. Instead of lending his eight loaves of bread to the shoemaker, the baker can now exchange his saved eight loaves of bread for eight dollars and then lend those dollars to the shoemaker. With eight dollars, the shoemaker can secure either eight loaves of bread (or other goods) to support him while he is engaged in the making of shoes. The baker is supplying the shoemaker with the facility to access the pool of real savings, which among other things includes eight loaves of bread that the baker has produced. Note that without real savings, the lending of money is an exercise in futility. …

The existence of banks does not alter the essence of credit. Instead of the baker lending his money directly to the shoemaker, the baker lends his money to the bank, which in turn lends it to the shoemaker. …

Despite the apparent complexity that the banking system introduces, the act of credit remains the transfer of saved real stuff from lender to borrower. Without the increase in the pool of real savings, banks cannot create more credit. At the heart of the expansion of good credit by the banking system is an expansion of real savings.

Now, when the baker lends his eight dollars, we must remember that he has exchanged for these dollars eight saved loaves of bread. In other words, he has exchanged something for eight dollars. So when a bank lends those eight dollars to the shoemaker, the bank lends fully “backed-up” dollars so to speak.

False Credit Is an Agent of Economic Destruction

Trouble emerges however if, instead of lending fully backed-up money, a bank engages in fractional-reserve banking, the issuing of empty money, backed up by nothing.

When unbacked money is created, it masquerades as genuine money that is supposedly supported by real stuff. In reality, however, nothing has been saved. So when such money is issued, it cannot help the shoemaker, since the pieces of empty paper cannot support him in producing shoes — what he needs instead is bread. But, since the printed money masquerades as proper money, it can be used to “steal” bread from some other activities and thereby weaken those activities.

This is what the diversion of real wealth by means of money “out of thin air” is all about. If the extra eight loaves of bread aren’t produced and saved, it is not possible to have more shoes without hurting some other activities — activities that are much higher on the priority lists of consumers as far as life and well-being are concerned. This in turn also means that unbacked credit cannot be an agent of economic growth.

Rather than facilitating the transfer of savings across the economy to wealth-generating activities, when banks issue unbacked credit they are in fact setting in motion a weakening of the process of wealth formation. It has to be realized that banks cannot relentlessly pursue unbacked lending without the existence of the central bank, which, by means of monetary pumping, makes sure that the expansion of unbacked credit doesn’t cause banks to bankrupt each other.

We can thus conclude that, as long as the increase in lending is fully backed up by real savings, it must be regarded as good news, since it promotes the formation of real wealth. False credit, which is generated “out of thin air,” is bad news: credit which is unbacked by real savings is an agent of economic destruction.

Fed and Treasury Actions Only Make Things Worse

Neither the Fed nor the Treasury is a wealth generator: they cannot generate real savings. This in turn means that all the pumping that the Fed has been doing recently cannot increase lending unless the pool of real savings is expanding. On the contrary, the more money the Fed and other central banks are pushing, the more they are diluting the pool of real savings. …

If the pool of real savings is still growing, then doing nothing (and allowing the interest rate to reflect reality) will allow the recession to be short lived and economic recovery to emerge as fast as possible. (At a higher interest rate, various bubble activities will go belly up. As a result, more real savings will become available to wealth generators. This in turn will work towards the lowering of interest rates.)

We suggest that decades of reckless monetary policies by the Fed have severely depleted the pool of real savings. More of these same loose policies cannot make the current situation better. On the contrary, such policies only further delay the economic recovery.

By impoverishing wealth generators, the current policies of the government and the Fed run the risk of converting a short recession into a prolonged and severe slump.

If Princeton and the rest weren’t run by fools and knaves, this is the kind of thing they would be teaching, not Bernanke’s brand of institutionalized theft.

I recommend reading Shostak’s whole essay. Click around the Mises site while you’re there. It is a wonderful resource for real economics, the kind that can make you money. The Rothhbard and Mises files would be good places to start.

Why bailouts will not stop the depression

The market is a force of nature, like gravity. To use it is prosperity. To fight it is misery.

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By bankers, for bankers.

This is a bailout of bankers. The Fed was created by bankers, and the Treasury is run by a banker, so there are no surprises here.

The plan is to have the government take banks’ bad mortgage debt (will they add credit card, auto, student and corporate debt?), so that they are no longer insolvent. Solvency has always been the issue, not liquidity — that is a red herring. By no means will all of the bad debt (out of $50 trillion in total domestic financial and non-financial sector private debt) be absorbed by this program, which is going to move $700 billion at a time.

The fact that the government still relies on a market for its bonds puts limits on the pace at which debt can be socialized. There has been a great demand for Treasuries of late as safe havens, so the first tranche or two should be absorbed easily. Bonds may even rally more as assets prices continue to plunge.

Later, after the bulk of the deflation has passed and the bond market is saturated, this demand will ease and the Fed will have to buy greater and greater amounts of bonds with newly created dollars. The government’s spending needs are infinite, but the tax base and bond market are finite, so this phase of inflation can lead to currency failure. That can be chaotic, because contracts become meaningless when currencies are worthless. Out of such episodes arose Napoleon and Hitler.

Econ 101: Savings = Investment.  Lesson: reward savers with deflation.

We should embrace deflation, not fight it, because it restores sanity. The irresponsible go broke, and the prudent are rewarded. When money is tight, prices need to come down, and this encourages the savings that will turn to investment after the dust settles. Those who were smart enough to go into this crisis with savings are the ones you want allocating the capital for rebuilding, not the swindlers who beg for newly printed ‘stimulus’ money for their pet projects.

Your neighborhood, a government housing project.

Let’s assume the program actually removes all bad debt from bank’s balance sheets. Once again, they are fully capitalized and ready to issue loans, with assistance of course from an accommodating Fed. That will ‘fix’ one side of the reflation machine. On the other side, borrowers will still be choking on their existing debt and in no condition to take on more.

So the next step on the road back to inflation city will have to be debt relief for borrowers. As the owner of huge amounts of mortgages, the government is likely to be a very accommodating creditor. Can’t handle $2000 a month? Well, just pay $1000, but promise to spend the rest, ok! Or it could offer a quickie default: we take the house, but you can rent from us for cheap. In either case, the government has title to an enormous amount of housing stock, so all of America takes on the air of an inner city housing project.

(A side note: Once government becomes your landlord, it has a lot more leverage to force the installation of whatever it wants in your home, from ugly fluorescent lighting and those ‘efficient’ toilets that clog, to monitoring devices for your ‘safety’.)

The Crash is the Market, and It cannot be stopped.

Crashes are the market’s way of correcting the perversions of bubbles blown by bankers and governments. They are not market failures. The Market never fails. It is a force of nature. Bankers and politicians can shackle us with their guns and laws, but they cannot change the way the universe organizes itself. Any scheme but freedom, the absence of force (such as theft, a form of which is inflation), will be thwarted by the Market. Tax cheats, corrupt politicians, crooked brokers, smugglers and prostitutes are as plentiful as the laws that create them. In the absence of force (as George Washington said, “government is not reason; it is not eloquent; it is force”), the Market will reward honesty and industry above all else. When force is used liberally, society rewards George Bush Jr and Angelo Mozillo.

The government has tried to thwart the Market for so long, from the New Deal to the S&L crisis and beyond, that the distortions have become too big to support, and this time the Market is taking its revenge. Saving some big banks and some borrowers is certainly possible with bailout programs (rent seekers should call their lobbyists ASAP to get on that list!). But $50 trillion is way, way beyond anything the government can handle, so there will still be massive debt deflation left and right, and asset prices will continue to crash.

Debt revulsion is the fly in the reflation ointment.

To reflate, we need willing and able borrowers and lenders (inflation is the net increase of money and credit, deflation is their net decrease). Even if all bad debt is taken off the books of both borrowers and lenders, can the Feds rekindle America’s affair with debt? The answer is yes, eventually, but it won’t be any fun this time.

If the government forces the issue before the Market has cleared the way for growth, people will only be willing to borrow again to protect against the decline in the value of currency. During the crash, currency will continue to gain in value, so for at least the next couple of years, borrowers are going to be very wary of debt. They don’t want to repeat this nightmare, and besides, with asset prices crashing, the economy in a tailspin, and new regulations restricting commerce, where on earth can investors profitably deploy this capital? China? Not so fast — investing abroad may be restricted. Even with a 0% loan, can borrowers generate any return at all in this environment? With poor investment prospects and no need to protect against inflation, few will be willing to borrow.

This is why the traditional reflation machine will stay broken. This is the machine that Greenspan operated for the bankers with such mastery. But try as Bernanke might, this machine will not start up again until money or credit is somehow flooded into the economy through other means.

¡Chavismo!

In Hugo Chavez’s Venezuela, people borrow not for productive uses, but to speculate in any kind of asset that will lose value at a slower rate than inflation plus interest. It is a sickening thought, because it totally perverts all economic decisions and leads to staggering waste. We have just experienced a milder version of this in the US, but at least we built a few useful things with the credit, though most will go to waste.

In Venezuela, people invest in new automobiles, sometimes fleets of them, because the sum of interest and depreciation on the vehicles is less than the rate of general price increases. Hence, cars bought new appreciate in Bolivars as they rust in driveways. Venezuelan society is in a later stage decay than the US, but it may resemble our future.

The new New Deal, and the Neverending War

So how do you get that stubborn price level (the rearward looking indicator, CPI, was negative in August — expect more and bigger negative numbers for many months to come) to start ticking up again with gusto? After a general asset price crash, which I emphasize cannot be prevented at this point, the government can spend and spend and spend.

If you think the bridge to nowhere was ridiculous, you haven’t seen anything yet. Our sociopathic leaders, with hearty encouragement by esteemed professors, seem to have no problem with the old Keynesian theory of burying bottles stuffed with cash and letting people dig them up. Hey, it puts people to work and raises the price level! Let’s all pray for more hurricanes while we’re at it. Think of the boost to GDP!

Expect lots of pork for ‘green’ energy projects, and expect those projects to cost more than they produce and have all kinds of perverse effects. Expect national ‘service’ programs (if mandatory, they are national enslavement programs) such as have been touted by Obama, Hillary and the media wing of the Fascist party (now the only party in power in the US).

We were all taught in school that although FDR’s valiant efforts helped put Americans back to work, what really saved the US from sinking into a big hole the earth was War, glorious War. How lucky of us to already have two of them going and plenty more enemies lined up just in case!

Take it from Murray Rothbard; this is no market failure.

Austrian economics has the answers to all your boom-bust questions (and can make you money — try that with Keynesianism or whatever they are calling today’s brand of socialist economics).

I am just going to quote the incomparable Murray Rothbard here (source):

 

“We can only sum up the correct answer to the problem of the business cycle. We have already seen a hint of the solution: that inflation and the inflationary boom are caused by bank credit expansion generated by governments. In fact, government’s central banking system provides the key causal element for all business cycles, a cause exogenous to the market economy. Continuing government intervention sets in motion business cycles by generating inflationary booms. Because these booms distort the signals of the market place in interest rates and in relative prices they bring about grave distortions of production and prices, which must be corrected by recessions and depressions.

In short, government intervention cripples the market economy, and recession or depression is the painful but necessary adjustment by which the market reasserts itself, and liquidates the distortions committed by the government’s inflationary boom. After each depression, the government generates inflation once again, because it is the government’s natural tendency to inflate. Why? Quite simply, whoever is granted a monopoly of printing money (e.g., the Fed, the Bank of England) will use that monopoly and print – to finance government deficits, or to subsidize favored economic groups. Power will tend to be used, and the power to create money out of thin air is no exception to the rule.

And so we see – and this is the great insight of the “Austrian” theory of the trade cycle – that micro and macro economics are in harmony after all. The free market does tend to adjust harmoniously without boom and bust, without incurring clusters of severe business losses. It is government intervention in the market that creates the business cycle, and unfortunately makes the corrective adjustment of recessions necessary. The cause of the boom-bust cycle is not some mystical periodic Force to which man must bend his will; the fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars but in ourselves, that we are underlings.”

Murray was a fearless enemy of the state and prolific writer. You can find tons of good stuff from him here on LewRockwell.com.

Greenspan was Framed! Blame bankers’ moral hazard, not their lackey.

Source: The Johnsville News

The Cover Story

It has become commonplace to lay blame for the greatest of asset bubbles on the inflationary policies of Sir Allen Greenspan and his employer. A typical critique goes something like this: For the last 20 years, every time the market started to liquidate bad debts and malinvestments (the junk bond bust, the crash of ’87, the early ’90s recession, the LTCM blowup, and dot-com crash), Greenspan just turned on the money spigot and made it all better again with lower rates. Because he so encouraged borrowers and lowered or eliminated reserve limits for lenders, we avoided the necessary catharsis and let bad investment pile upon bad investment, with ever increasing asset prices and debt levels, until we reached the stratosphere last year. By then the system had become so saturated with debt, and asset prices so high, that mass bankruptcy and liquidation was inevitable.

The Real Killers

This history is correct, but not complete, and it lays no blame on the true evil at the heart of the age-old problem of the credit cycle. In any analysis of historical events, one must sift through dunes of BS, and the best way to do that is to ask, Qui Bono? (“as a benefit to whom?”). The answer of course, is bankers and their perennial sidekicks, politicians. The latter designation includes the ‘Maestro,’ whom, while valuable for his mastery of obfuscation, could have easily been replaced had he not played ball. Bankers have no qualms about overextending credit, because they, more than any other party, control the government. Politicians and the bureaucracies they create have always worked for money, and bankers have always been the highest bidders.

The Means

The primary mechanism by which bankers steal from the public is fractional reserve lending, which is enabled by the socialization of losses through FDIC insurance and the Federal Reserve’s monopoly over currency.  FDIC absolves commercial bankers from responsibility for their client’s deposits, and the Fed and Treasury lock the public into the rigged system.

The Motive

Within FDIC limits, depositors have no incentive to seek out banks that employ sound lending standards. Because banks are all equally safe from the depositor’s point of view, bankers have no incentive to be cautious. They have a strong disincentive to be so, because the more credit banks extend (the higher their leverage), and the shakier the enterprises to which they lend (at higher interest), the higher their rate of return during the credit expansion (inflation) phase of the cycle. The name of the game is to grow your balance sheet as fast as possible, with little concern as to reserve ratios or collateralization.

The Opportunity

Once the bust arrives, bank executives have already collected so much in salary and bonuses and sold so much stock to an ever-credulous public, that it isn’t very painful for them if their bank fails, since they have become rich. But once a bank gets big enough (remember, the name of the game is to expand your balance sheet), it is easy for its now powerful executives to ‘convince’ politicians that failure would be so damaging that the Treasury (i.e., public) must assume its debts for the greater good.  At critical times, it may be desirable to cut out the middle man and place a trusted member of the cartel directly in the federal executive.

The Fed is Just an Accomplice

In the meantime, the Federal Reserve is called upon to extend cheap credit to banks in general, which often entails the printing of new paper or digital money. The lower base rates that ensue help banks to get off their feet again by encouraging the public to borrow more than is warranted by economic conditions. (Note: The above is how things worked before we reached Peak Credit last year, and the bankers and Fed are trying with all their might to inflate again, but they will be continually confounded. The game is now over, because nobody wants or can afford any more debt, and banks are finally so impaired by defaults that they cannot lend. Also, at $50 trillion in total private debt, the entire mess is now too big to bail, given the Fed’s mere $900 billion balance sheet.)

A Long History of Offense

So that is it in a nutshell: a completely corrupt monetary system. It is nothing new. We have had episodes like this since before Andrew Jackson abolished the first national bank. So long as a national bank has a monopoly on money creation and legal tender laws obligate the public to use fiat currency and not an alternative such as gold, bankers will retain a lock on the economy and the boom-bust cycle will continue, at great expense to our security and quality of life.

Can They Help it? Isn’t it Just Human Nature?

The credit cycle is a natural phenomenon, yes, but so is war. And just as right-thinking people oppose that other means by which the public is exploited by the oligarchy, so they should oppose fractional reserve lending and the institutions that support it: the Federal Reserve system, the FDIC, and legal tender laws.

Deflation? Are you serious?

From a July 9 letter to a friend inquiring about my thoughts on gold:

I think everyone needs to own some physical gold now, since the dollar will flameout eventually, though I don’t think just yet. Also, things could get really hairy, so along with gold I’d have an account or two outside the country and a list of favorite safe-havens. If it gets so bad that you might need guns and gold coins, it’s better to get out and watch it on TV!

On the other hand, crazy as it seems, I do not think of this as an inflationary period right now, but deflationary. The best way to think of inflation is not as price increases, but as credit expansion–easy money–which happens to result in higher prices. Credit expansion has turned to credit contraction in the US and most of the rest of the world, though China and some other eastern countries are lagging. The UK and Europe and Latin America are very close on the heels of the US–Spain is a bloodbath right now, and the UK is about where we were last fall.

As credit is withdrawn (no more HELOCs or CC offers), people have less money to spend and many are levered to the gills already so it is all they can do not to default, let alone take on more debt. They can’t and don’t feel like splurging on cars and vacations and consumer goods anymore. And the Banks’ balance sheets have been laid to waste from all the defaults on under-collateralized loans, so they can’t lend, and would be too afraid to if they could.

In an economy like the US, when credit dries up, whole industries crash–housing, autos, retailers, restaurants, airlines, and people get laid off. They stop shopping and start defaulting, and the banks get hit even harder, so they can make even fewer loans, and the shit gets deeper. This goes on and on until all of the reckless borrowers and reckless banks are bust. Usually, they are just a few, but things got so crazy lately that it is going to keep spreading to include almost every consumer and every bank in some way.

This is a long-winded way of saying that nobody has any money anymore. So far just in the West, but soon in Asia too, since this is one global economy. With everyone broke or tight-fisted, how can people keep bidding prices up on anything? Already stocks, houses, cars, clothing, electronics and other toys are getting cheaper. All that is still going up are commodities, since China is still booming and building a new Milwaukee a week. But they have borrowed too much and built too fast just like us, so will feel the hurt before long. Their exports are slowing by double digits, and their stock market is down by 50% since last summer, so I think this is already happening.

So while Obama will channel FDR and try to spend us out of this mess (and make it worse), those programs will be slow in coming and actually pale in comparison to the credit destruction and loss of wealth that is going on right now. Crazy as it seems, dollars are great to have right now, though Swiss Francs are better.

I like physical gold, though I’ve been selling my gold shares. I think gold topped out for now back in March at 1000, when advisors were about 98% bullish on it, and I think it could drop under 700 before long if not to 600, so I’ve hedged what I have with puts on GLD. But everything else will drop a lot more than gold, so gold’s real purchasing power should continue to increase for a long time.

So I think this inflation scare will pass soon. The bond market is way smarter than the stock market and it has been signalling deflation with falling yields across the curve. I think we’ll see 1.5% T-bill rates again soon.

I’m very aggressively short so I don’t have much cash myself, but I think cash will be king. The markets tend to inflict maximum pain on the maximum number, so it doesn’t bother me that almost nobody else is thinking deflation right now. One great blogger who is is Mish Shedlock: globaleconomicanalysis.blogspot.com. I’ve learned a lot about the credit cycle from him and from Bob Prechter. The other side of the inflation/deflation argument is held by guys like Jim Grant, Jim Rogers, Doug Casey, Marc Faber, and Peter Schiff, all of whom I read and respect a lot.

Won’t the Fed print? Yes, but not fast enough or nearly enough, when you consider that there is about 40 Trillion in private debt (govt debt is another 60 Trillion including entitlements) in the US and the Fed’s balance sheet is less than 900 billion. They just don’t have the ammo to make much difference in the short-run (2-3 years), though they certainly will destroy the dollar before this is all over many years from now. This is why when I am done shorting in a year or two I’m going to put my proceeds in gold.