The Great Depression with Amity Shlaes
FDR didn’t save capitalism from itself. Debt based money does not a capitalist system make
This video is a bit old, the US dollar is temporarily rising as I post this comment, but the purpose of this clip is to help people understand that capitalism and debt based money are not the same. America was never intended to have a central bank. You can be capitalist without this ball and chain around our knecks. Free market capitalists hate the current system and have been predicting it’s end for decades. Is the delusion of hope and Obamanomics worthwhile?
Many people are pleased with the election of Obama, but I have observed that most of the blindly hopeful are also blindly clueless as to the true nature of the various crises afflicting the United States. My question I suppose is whether it matters — can psychology alone cure these problems? If software developers ruled the world
Yesterday I discussed the incredible benefits of open source software in terms of reducing costs for startups and promoting competition in the marketplace… but the real magic of software is the concept of abstraction, it’s when a developer can consume a service using a single stable interface regardless of how the producer chooses to implement the service behind the scenes. The multitude of choices in the software realm (compounded by the open source world) necessitates standard interfaces for these components. I wonder if other industries could also benefit from similar ideas. One industry to rule them all
Every time I take another dabble in the open source world I am amazed at the depth and breadth of truly top quality software available at absolutely no charge. I’m developing a new project that requires some enterprise quality infrastructure, so I took a good look at the Spring framework, Apache project, and the Open Symphony project… Now I’ve used some of their products before (as well as several vendor frameworks) but these tools are now almost plug-n-play good. An alternative scenario: inflation AND deflation
All my predictions and calculations assume governments will intervene to re-inflate the credit bubble. My conclusion was that their efforts would ultimately be in vain as the excess currency loses its ability to generate real economic expansion in the developed nations, instead, it simply causes a plague of inflation that could threaten the viability of the entire currency system. Perhaps governments eventually return to a responsible course and a bottom is reached, perhaps they don’t. Why Americans will suffer more
The problem facing everyone is a loss of American demand. Americans don’t earn enough income, they have no savings and foreigners are refusing to lend them any more money. Americans are losing equity in their homes, their stocks and their pension funds. When Americans stop spending on domestic or foreign trinkets and automobiles, companies have the option to export those items somewhere else. When Americans stop spending on services, the companies close their doors. The majority of Americans work in the service sector. This is not the 1970′s, this is not the lost decade in Japan. When Americans stop spending and the service sector shuts down, unemployment will rise dramatically as the downward spiral is re-enforced. Gold makes a new… high?
Gold is making all time new highs against pretty much every major currency, except the US dollar and the Japanese Yen. Gold is not down, those currencies are up. So you have to ask yourself, is that sustainable? Is that move a result of a qualitative assessment regarding the relative performance of American assets compared to the world or a result of a technical condition (too many people borrowed too much money in those currencies to buy stuff abroad and are now liquidating their assets to pay back their obligations due to credit tightening). I have heard interesting arguments on both sides from people I respect, but over the long term does anybody really believe a dollar spent in America will yield the same growth prospects as a dollar spent in Asia? How much higher can the standard of living in the developed world rise relative to our financially challenged friends abroad? Just keep this in mind — one day dollars will be plentiful again, where will they be spent? John Stossel – Politically Incorrect Guide To Politics
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