Post
Topic
Board Economics
Re: Jim Rickards' New Book "The Death of Money", Review
by
blackhull
on 15/05/2014, 16:53:57 UTC

Alright, well clearly you have some radical opinions on this. Can you provide any backing for what you just said? That was an incredibly bold statement. Which research / set of facts led you to this conclusion? It seems like you've said anybody who worked in that industry "wouldn't know about it anyways" or something along those lines. I just don't understand how that can be.

I think if there is somebody more qualified than Bernanke, Yellen, etc. it is of the utmost importance that we find them and make sure they are in the right position.

My opinion is only considered radical in the real world, but on this board, I think a lot of posters would agree.

Nothing against academics who have actually worked in economy. What I was talking about are the pure academics, who prove again and again they can just draw pretty graphs on a blackboard and tell you about theory beautifully, but they can't manage anything in reality.

Examples:

We have had 5,5 years of unprecedented money creation and ridiculously low interest rates. The US money supply is many times as high as a couple of years ago (just google "US money supply" images for graphs), yet the economy is tanking (it is, don't believe what the mainstream media is telling you). But the FED keeps on doing what they are doing. What would you have said 7 years ago if someone told you interest rates would be kept near 0 for many years (many more to come) and the money supply quadrupled or whatever? You would have declared them insane.

That's where we are living now, in an insane economic reality.

So I think it's fair to say that something isn't optimal here and Ben isn't the genius Time Magazine made him look like when they gave him their "Person of the Year" cover...

Yellen admitted herself she had no clue about the bursting bubble of 2007/2008 and didn't see it coming.

Unfortunately, the right people will never be in the right position there, because they are not in the sheltered realm of politics, but out there in the real world. And also, it can be a very unpleasant thing to face the truth sometimes...

If I was president, I would make Peter Schiff or somebody like him Fed chairman, ha ha!

Another example: I was discussing inflation with so many friends who had studied economy, and they all seemed to believe the official inflation numbers. They had learned about this stuff for years, but couldn't even keep their eyes open for price changes at the supermarket. One good friend of mine, a clever guy, said he would ask his professor about this. A couple of weeks later we talked again and of course he told me his professor had assured him the official numbers are correct.

I don't even want to get into what happened when I told my friends about the massive gold price suppression (which is a proven fact), ha ha...

I have seen it again and again... those are just a couple of examples.

You seem pretty new to this way of thinking, you can check out websites like zerohedge.com, if you are interested. You get a lot of info there the mass media would never tell you...


Base money is not money supply, it seems like you're confusing the two.

When does working "in the economy" inform your macroeconomic decisions? Like I said, complete and totally different things. This is like saying you need to know arcane technical requirements to be a superior general in wartime. Sure, some things can help, but grand unified strategy and leading a military would be totally different than what is required of an individual soldier on the ground.

You also didn't really show me how the economy was deteriorating, and expected me to trust your claims despite no proof being provided and directly contradicting what lots of hard data show.

Why are low interest rates and changes in the base money considered so "crazy"? You kind of made a logical jump there.

How does it work that you would probably use the laws of supply/demand to justify lots of these positions, but when your "supply" goes up (in your equation, not mine) nothing happens to value? Has the supply of money really increased, or is the monetary system more complex than that?

I actually "grew up" on ZeroHedge, thanks for the recommendation. I like it - it is thought provoking and frequently addresses things that many other people don't. I was able to learn quite a great deal from that website, but ultimately that site taught me so much about how to think about things that I now realize the huge flaws in it. Why is ZeroHedge so consistently wrong or incorrect? You claim the CPI is invalid, but how do you reconcile that with this? http://www.pricestats.com/us-series