Milton Friedman

HUMOR: Top Ten Reasons Why Fiat Currency Is Superior To Gold (Or Silver) Money

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– Top Ten Reasons Why Fiat Currency Is Superior To Gold (Or Silver) Money (The Daily Capitalist, Dec 27, 2012):

By John Butler, on December 27th, 2012

In the spirit of the holidays and hope for a more prosperous 2013, I thought my readers might appreciate a little humour to partially offset the relentless doom and gloom associated with the Amphora Report. So please, don’t take this edition too seriously. But if you happen to stumble across a ‘paperbug’ or two over the holidays, perhaps you could share some of the points made here. Humour sometimes helps people realise just how hopelessly misguided they are. Cheers!

Number 10: There Is Not Enough Gold (Or Silver) In The World To Serve As Money

Let’s begin with the obvious. We know that central banks the world over have printed money at exponentially growing rates for years. There is now so much paper and electronic money floating around the world that gold (or silver) can not possibly be expected to keep up. You can’t print gold, after all, you need to find it, dig it out of the ground, refine it, etc, a hugely expensive and time-consuming process which practically ensures a stable rather than exponentially growing supply of the stuff.

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Ben Bernanke Just Told A Massive Lie About Milton Friedman

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“The power to determine the quantity of money… is too important, too pervasive, to be exercised by a few people, however public-spirited, if there is any feasible alternative. There is no need for such arbitrary power… Any system which gives so much power and so much discretion to a few men, [so] that mistakes – excusable or not – can have such far reaching effects, is a bad system. It is a bad system to believers in freedom just because it gives a few men such power without any effective check by the body politic – this is the key political argument against an independent central bank.”
– Milton Friedman

– Ben Bernanke Just Told A Massive Lie About Milton Friedman (ZeroHedge, Oct 1, 2012):

Submitted by Mike Krieger of Libertyblitzkrieg

Ben Bernanke Just Told A Massive Lie About Milton Friedman And I Can Prove It

Ben Bernanke is so desperate to find support regarding his steal from the poor and give to the 0.01% policies he is now telling blatant lies about famous, dead economists that can’t refute what he says.  In this case Milton Friedman.  In his Q&A today, The Bernank claimed:

*BERNANKE: MILTON FRIEDMAN WOULD HAVE SUPPORTED WHAT FED DOING

Well I suppose it’s easy to make things up about people that can’t claim otherwise, but he made a big mistake this time.  Why?  Because Anna Schwartz, who co-wrote the famous work “A Monetary History of the United States” with Milton Friedman in 1963, actually came on the record on several occasions calling out The Bernank and saying there’s no way Friedman would agree.  The sad part about this is it seems Bernanke waited until Schwartz died to really start spewing the lies.  This guy is not only dangerous he is despicable and increasingly desperate…

Don’t take it from me though, back in October 2008 Anna Schwartz had this to say in the Wall Street Journal:

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The Problem Was Never Liquidity, But Insolvency . . . And We Should Let Insolvent Banks Fail

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The problem was never really liquidity.

Says who?

Says Anna Schwartz, co-author of the leading book on the Great Depression, and someone who actually lived through it.

The Wall Street Journal ran an interview with Schwartz last weekend:

Most people now living have never seen a credit crunch like the one we are currently enduring. Ms. Schwartz, 92 years old [but still sharp as a tack], is one of the exceptions. She’s not only old enough to remember the period from 1929 to 1933, she may know more about monetary history and banking than anyone alive. She co-authored, with Milton Friedman, “A Monetary History of the United States” (1963). It’s the definitive account of how misguided monetary policy turned the stock-market crash of 1929 into the Great Depression.

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Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke has called the 888-page “Monetary History” “the leading and most persuasive explanation of the worst economic disaster in American history.” Ms. Schwartz thinks that our central bankers and our Treasury Department are getting it wrong again.

Read moreThe Problem Was Never Liquidity, But Insolvency . . . And We Should Let Insolvent Banks Fail

Fed `Rogue Operation’ Spurs Further Bailout Calls

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Ben Bernanke, chairman of the U.S. Federal Reserve, arrives at the Federal Reserve building for a Federal Reserve Open Market Committee meeting in Washington, April 29, 2008. Photographer: Brendan Smialowski/Bloomberg News

May 2 (Bloomberg) — A month after the Federal Reserve rescued Bear Stearns Cos. from bankruptcy, Chairman Ben S. Bernanke got an S.O.S. from Congress.

There is “a potential crisis in the student-loan market” requiring “similar bold action,” Chairman Christopher Dodd of Connecticut and six other Democrats wrote Bernanke. They want the Fed to swap Treasury notes for bonds backed by student loans. In a separate letter, Pennsylvania Democratic Representative Paul Kanjorski and 31 House members said they want Bernanke to channel money directly to education-finance firms.

Student loans are just the start. Former Fed officials and other Fed-watchers say that Bernanke’s actions in saving Bear Stearns will expose the central bank to continuing pressure to use its $889 billion balance sheet to prop up companies or entire industries deemed important by politicians. The Fed satisfied Dodd’s request today, expanding the swaps to include securities backed by student debt.

“It is appalling where we are right now,” former St. Louis Fed President William Poole, who retired in March, said in an interview. The Fed has introduced “a backstop for the entire financial system.”

Critics argue that the result will be to foster greater risk-taking among investors emboldened by the belief that the government will bail them out of bad decisions.

The Fed’s loans to Bear Stearns were “a rogue operation,” said Anna Schwartz, who co-wrote “A Monetary History of the United States” with the late Nobel laureate Milton Friedman.

`No Business’

“To me, it is an open and shut case,” she said in an interview from her office in New York. “The Fed had no business intervening there.”

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