Last week, headlines around the world were screaming out the sad tale of WorldCom and its $4 billion or so misstatement of earnings. But should we really be surprised that another poster child of the boom--especially one whose growth has come through rapid-fire acquisitions led by a rock star CEO--has been revealed to be a hotbed of malpractice?
The present unstable financial system cannot be fixed by means of a monetary policy that targets the price of gold, argues Frank Shostak. This framework, favored by supply-siders, is likely to further destabilize the economy. What is needed is not a reversion to the bankrupt Bretton Woods system, but a genuine gold standard, where gold is money.
Popular thinking about economic growth is still strongly influenced by the productivity theory of capital, which presumes that capital engenders a yield like the fruits from a tree, writes Antony P. Mueller. If it were merely aggregate investment that mattered, economic development and continuous wealth creation would be child's play.
The quirky nature of credit is that it is not necessarily better in abundance, writes Christopher Mayer. It's not like beer, butter, and bananas--where more means cheaper and cheaper is good. Credit is like money; it represents buying power. More credit means more buying power, which means a bidding up of assets and a spark for an unsustainable boom.
The well-being of the majority of any nation's economically disenfranchised citizens could be realized without any state control of the nation's money supply or state regulation of peaceful economic activity, writes Harry Valetine. It is a lesson that could inspire entire populations to wrest control of the economy away from the statist elitists.
Philadelphia was the home not only of the first two federal banks, but it was the home of the two libertarian political economists who introduced and defended the independent treasury idea into the public consciousness, and created public pressure for its enactment.
Any manager of a private trust fund who would dare to spend the funds entrusted to him and replace them with his IOUs would face criminal charges, writes Hans Sennholz. When the U.S. Treasury does it, it is called "creative financing." But there is a price to be paid.
This is how government works: If you can be really egregious at what you do--say you run Amtrak, the Defense or Education departments or, better yet, the SEC--you scream out that there is a dire national need. Then it will be easy to find legislators to turn on the money spigot for you and give you “whatever” you need.
The burdens imposed upon producers by easy money and their consequent lack of profitability are among the main reasons why there is no significant capital expenditure. The overhang from the 2000 capital-spending boom only partly exacerbates this, since much of the outlay undertaken then was wastefully misallocated and is not germane to the needs of the current economy anyway.
The monetary situation in Argentina is a glaring example of confiscatory deflation. In 1992, after yet another bout of hyperinflation, Argentina pegged its new currency, the peso, to the US dollar at the rate of 1-to-1. In order to maintain this fixed peso/dollar peg, the Argentine central bank pledged to freely exchange dollars for pesos on demand and to back its own liabilities, consisting of peso notes and commercial bank reserve deposits denominated in pesos, almost 100 percent by dollars.
