Last week, we wrote that regulations, taxes, environmental compliance, and fear of lawsuits forces companies to put useless ingredients into their products. We said:
“For example, milk comes from the ingredients of: land, cows, ranch labor, dairy labor, dairy capital equipment, distribution labor, distribution capital, and consumable containers.”
There are eight necessary ingredients, without which milk cannot be produced.
This week my second son Joey turns 30 and my granddaughter Addie turns 3- just a day apart. The reason I bring this up is that we took a few days and visited Disney World in Florida.
As I walked into Disney’s Main Street I was reminded of a simpler and happier time here in America that many today cannot remember. America was a place where budding entrepreneurs could hang out a shingle without much government interference and chase their dreams. Mom and pop stores could make a living and provide services that made life easier for everyone. With few regulations and few barriers to entry many could earn a living and make their lives better. This Main Street is a reminder of this. Low taxes, low interference, high growth and stable money. Life was good for most.
Those with great ideas were rewarded with great fortunes.
We think we are the only generation to be smart. In the 19th century, they did not have the internal combustion engine. In the 18th century, they did not have the railroad. In the 17th century, they did not have the piano. So, most people assume, they were dumb. They did not know about smart phones, so they would not have understood anything. Such as money.
So let’s tell the story of the ancient city of Orinthus. They were innovators in money, millennia ahead of their time…
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Orinthus was inhabited by the first people to settle down with agriculture and fishing. Soon, a new class of evolved: those who crafted goods out of riverbank clay, animal hides, and even stone quarried from the local hills. With the advent of real production and trade, they soon discovered it’s terribly inefficient if the guy who made leather needed to find a fisherman who needed shoes whenever he was hungry. They realized they needed money.
By Alasdair Macleod – Re-Blogged From Gold Eagle
The monetary, financial and political weaknesses of the EU are about to be exposed by the forthcoming global credit crisis.
This article assumes the combination of end of credit cycle dynamics and the rise in trade protectionism in 1929 is a valid precedent for gauging the scale of a developing global credit crisis today, as described in my earlier article published here. Then, it was heavier tariffs coinciding with a less destabilising inflation cycle than we face today, a combination that saw stock markets collapse. Today, we have the additional factors of far greater monetary inflation, far higher levels of government debt, low savings coupled with record consumer borrowing, and unbacked fiat currencies likely to lose purchasing power instead of gold-backed currencies which increased their purchasing power.
Declining international trade has already become evident in only a few months, and prescient observers detect early signs of a rapidly developing global recession. In response, the ECB has announced it will target lending to non-financial businesses with its TLTRO-III programme from September onwards.
The explanation for the sudden halt in global economic growth is found in the coincidence of peak credit combining with trade protectionism. The history of economic downturns points to a rerun of the 1929-32 period, but with fiat currencies substituted for a gold standard. Government finances are in far worse shape today, and markets have yet to appreciate the consequences of just a moderate contraction in global trade. Between new issues and liquidation by foreigners, domestic buyers will need to absorb $2 trillion of US Treasuries in the coming year, so QE is bound to return with a vengeance, the last hurrah for fiat currencies. However, China and Russia have the means to escape this fate, assuming they have the gumption to do so.
It may be too early to say the world is entering a significant economic downturn, but even ardent bulls must admit to it as an increasing possibility. Financial analysts, both bovine and ursine, face a complex matrix of factors when judging the future effect of any downturn on currencies, and of the prospects for the dollar in particular.
By Alasdair Macleod – Re-Blogged From Gold Money
The fiat money quantity is comprised of fiat money both in circulation and available for circulation, being parked at the central bank in the form of the reserves of depository institutions. The expansion of US$ FMQ since 1960 is shown in the chart below.
Before the great financial crisis of 2008/09, FMQ expanded reasonably consistently at an average annual rate of 5.9%, shown by the pecked line. Excess reserves were virtually non-existent and required reserves were at little more than $10bn. Following the Lehman crisis, quantitative easing led to the accumulation of excess reserves as depository institutions sold bonds to the Fed and had their reserve accounts credited with the proceeds. Consequently, FMQ increased at a significantly faster pace than its long-term trend, leaving it $5,386bn above the pre-Lehman crisis trend at the end of last year.
By Keith Weiner – Re-Blogged From Gold Eagle
It is easy to think of government interference into the economy like a kind of friction. If producers and traders were fully free, then they could improve our quality of life—with new technologies, better products, and lower prices—at a rate of X. But the more that the government does, the more it burdens them. So instead of X rate of progress, we get the same end result but 10% slower or 20% slower.
Some would go so far as to say, “The free market finds ways to work even through government restrictions, taxes, and regulations.” We won’t address cardboard straws emerging where plastic straws are banned. Or gangs selling illegal drugs on the black market, when they are prohibited by law.
As usual, we want to talk about the most important kind of government intervention. And it happens to be the one kind of government intervention that is accepted by nearly everyone. The intervention supported by the otherwise-free-marketers.
