Monday, November 23, 2009

The Grand Experiment

"None of the experimenters saw this crisis coming, but all of them claim to know the remedy! And a lot of talk about a market failure is being presented as the alleged root of this crisis. Sure, hedge funds, bankers, and regulators certainly played a role. But their reckless behavior is but a symptom of what had been going wrong and was not the cause. This crisis is not a market failure. It's a monumental policy failure! So we have to look into what causes a speculative bubble to understand the real culprits of the current predicament. The answer is fairly straight forward: Expanding money supply and credit growth. Since the central bank controls the money supply and credit growth, it's obvious that the central bank is accountable for the evolution of bubbles and the consequences of their inescapable bursting. Unfortunately we're not hearing or reading much about this obvious truth. Instead, fairytales about market failure are dominating the media. And an old and cynical policy joke comes immediately to mind: 'When the day of reckoning arrives there is but one policy solution: Lying, lying, lying.'. This seems to be the conclusion, the current credo of our politicians and the vast majority of economists. Many of whom are in the business of consulting politicians."
Claus Vogt - Weiss Research Inc.

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