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  • InLibrisLibertas
    Location : Mill Valley, California, United States

    I'm an independent investor. I make my living from the returns on my investments. I work at home, in the northern part of the San Francisco Bay area. I spent most of my career as an executive in high-tech, although I also spent time in banking. Down to one kid in university now!

Hayek Redux

September 26th, 2008 by reality

Ron Paul’s email points out: F.A. Hayek won the Nobel (Myrdal - see previous comments) Prize in Economics for showing how central banks’ manipulation of interest rates creates the boom-bust cycle with which we are sadly familiar. In 1932, in the depths of the Great Depression, he described the foolish policies being pursued in his day - and which are being proposed, just as destructively, in our own:

Instead of furthering the inevitable liquidation of the maladjustments brought about by the boom during the last three years, all conceivable means have been used to prevent that readjustment from taking place; and one of these means, which has been repeatedly tried though without success, from the earliest to the most recent stages of depression, has been this deliberate policy of credit expansion.

To combat the depression by a forced credit expansion is to attempt to cure the evil by the very means which brought it about; because we are suffering from a misdirection of production, we want to create further misdirection - a procedure that can only lead to a much more severe crisis as soon as the credit expansion comes to an end… It is probably to this experiment, together with the attempts to prevent liquidation once the crisis had come, that we owe the exceptional severity and duration of the depression.

Posted in Economics, Fixed Income, Government, Manias, Rogues and Rascals, Strategy & Scenarios, The Economy |

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