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Quantitative Easing – to the unwashed – has a benign ring to it. Say aloud, “Quantitative Easing.” Not frightening at all, right? Nothing like “Default,” which conjures up some really scary potential outcomes. Actually, to many investors who comprehend the nature of the problems the world faces, quantitative easing provides emotional relief. After all, haven’t
Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds is the classic text from 1841 by Charles Mackay that addresses the mass psychology that enables financial bubbles and their inevitable collapses. The entire book is available here as a free pdf in the Essential Readings section of the site. Grant Williams follows this theme
While several heads of Federal Reserve Banks have called for more quantitative easing, Boston’s Fed Head Eric Rosengren has upped the ante and is calling for “open-ended” quantitative easing of a “substantial magnitude.” No joke. Apparently, Rosengren has bought the John Law/John Maynard Keynes position that money is merely a medium of exchange and that
I’m always amazed at the number of people I meet who believe that Washington DC will still get its spending under control, that it’s just a matter of getting the right person, or the right party, into office and disaster will be averted. Or, that when we finally hit a real crisis, politicians will do the right thing – which is, incidentally, the complete opposite of what they’ve been doing for the last 100 years. Those are long odds if you ask me.
Recently, on CNBC’s Squawk Box, Paul Krugman ran into some surprisingly strong skepticism about his calls for more government spending. It was clear from the onset that no one was buying into the Keynesian philosophy that infinite government spending will save us all. It wasn’t easy, but the interviewers finally managed to tie him down as to how much spending is too much.
Keynesianism has been successful beyond Keynes’ wildest dreams. Not that Keynesianism has produced a viable economic system but that belief in Keynesianism so universally accepted among Establishment economists. But, the root evils of Keynesianism–fiat money and easy credit–are proving the undoing of the world’s economy.
Fridays, Eric King interviews Dan Norcini of Jim Sinclair’s JSMineset.com and me for KingWorldNews.com’s Weekly Metals Wrap. Generally, Dan talks about the technical aspects of the market, and I comment on the action in the physicals market. My remarks are short and usually casual. In last week’s comments, I noted how the atmosphere in the
In 1971, the dollar was officially relieved of its false promise of gold convertibility by creditors to the United States. In an attempt to spare the world’s economies from the effects of creative destruction, free markets and the invisible hand were traded in for centrally planned economies. Instead of market participants determining who succeeded and failed, that task increasingly became the domain of academicians, central bankers and politicians.
Notable mainstream economists and influential policy makers are calling for more quantitative easing, so many that QE3 is a given. Officially, it will be QE3, but in actuality it will be QE4 because “Operation Twist” is quantitative easing with another name. One important voice now calling for another round of QE is no less than
There’s so much confusion in the short term markets regarding QE and its ilk, that it’s easy to get whipsawed into oblivion – or at least complete frustration. You must maintain a steady fix on the big picture. Regardless of what the mainstream media experts would have you believe, none of the problems of the last four or forty years have been solved. In fact all of them are now worse.
