Sublime

Today government‐approved economics curricula still blame the gold standard for the Great Depression. The same gold standard which produced more than four decades of virtually uninterrupted global growth and prosperity between 1870 and 1914 suddenly stopped working in the 1930s because it wouldn't allow governments to expand their money supply to f

The IMF's top officials, powerful as they may be, have political masters—the Fund's twenty-four-person board, which represents the member countries' governments

Central banks are tasked with managing the money supply, which in turn should affect their currency’s value and inflation. To expand the money supply, most advanced countries buy their own bonds and give the seller currency, and to reduce the money supply, they sell their bonds and pull currency out of circulation. Interest rates can also be adjust

C’est dans ce cadre que le bazooka des banques centrales est déployé (d’abord par la Fed) afin de « soutenir le bon fonctionnement des marchés » de titres : en assouplissant ses règles prudentielles, en fournissant des liquidités sous forme de prêts à court terme, mais surtout avec des achats de titres (le quantitative easing) d’une amplitude rare.

The problem with government‐provided money is that its hardness depends entirely on the ability of those in charge to not inflate its supply. Only political constraints provide hardness, and there are no physical, economic, or natural constraints on how much money government can produce.

The severity of the Wall Street crash, he argued, was not due to the unrestrained license of a freebooting capitalist system, but to government insistence on keeping a boom going artificially by pumping in inflationary credit.

GREED RUN AMOK has been an essential feature of every spectacular boom in history.

Bank profits derive mainly from credit expansion, so they will tend to inflate credit as much as they can until they are checked.