Turning Hard Times Into Good Times

Doug Noland and Michael Oliver return. The Federal Reserve has led America and the post-1971 world to the brink of global bankruptcy. It has led the world to this brink of disaster by papering over one credit cycle after another. It has never really allowed the deflationary process to completely wash excesses of debt and mal investment of the past so that new healthy balance sheets could reemerge and an age of egalitarian capitalist prosperity could take hold again in America and beyond. Instead, it has reduced short term pain by bailing out failed companies, keeping them on life support, denying productive capital to be employed in creating “economic green shoots.” Crony capitalism has enriched a ruling elite who now uses the powers of government to deny competing ideas out of the public square and honest capital from competing against their monopolies. Given an absence of productive capital, natural laws of economics require a higher rate of interest to reach equilibrium which the Fed has so far reluctantl