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Yet our modern monetary mandarins never stop to consider Bagehot’s warnings about the adverse consequences of easy money – how interest rates set at 2 per cent or less fuel speculative manias, drive savers to make risky investments, encourage bad lending and weaken the financial system. One wonders whether any of them has actually opened the pages
... See moreEdward Chancellor • The Price of Time: The Real Story of Interest
no more need to have them enforce our contracts.
W. Brian Arthur • Complexity Economics: Proceedings of the Santa Fe Institute's 2019 Fall Symposium
Why were the credit systems of so many different countries, from Australia to Iceland, so vulnerable at the time? The unifying factor appears to be the low-interest rate policy of the Federal Reserve at the turn of the century, which, owing to the special position of the dollar as the global reserve currency, created the conditions for a credit boo
... See moreEdward Chancellor • The Price of Time: The Real Story of Interest
Only Alan Blinder, once a Fed vice chairman and a former Princeton colleague of Bernanke’s, defended the Fed. Blinder told this tale:
Andrew Ross Sorkin • Too Big to Fail: The Inside Story of How Wall Street and Washington Fought to Save the FinancialSystem--and Themselves
the Federal Reserve issued up to 2½-times more receipts than gold
John Rubino • The Money Bubble
His power was real, grounded in his unique role in channeling the ballooning trove of American savings. One way or another, through control of boards, investment partnerships, or just implicit understandings that a bank’s or an insurance company’s investment committee would follow Morgan’s lead, he and his partners disposed of perhaps 40 percent of
... See moreCharles R. Morris • The Tycoons: How Andrew Carnegie, John D. Rockefeller, Jay Gould, and J. P. Morgan Invented the American Supereconomy
Relying largely on intuition and common sense, Woodin had cut through a fog of financial advice and adopted the simplest of all possible solutions: the government would simply print new money. It would be backed not by gold or silver but by the assets of the banks in the Federal Reserve system.