'..Fed officials are largely responsible for the cycles of bubbles, booms, and busts over the last 30 years..''“In many important ways, the financial crash of 2008 had never ended. It was a long crash that crippled the economy for years. The problems that caused it went almost entirely unsolved. And this financial crash was compounded by a long crash in the strength of America’s democratic institutions. When America relied on the Federal Reserve to address its economic problems, it relied on a deeply flawed tool. All the Fed’s money only widened the distance between America’s winners and losers and laid the foundation for more instability. This fragile financial system was wrecked by the pandemic and in response the Fed created yet more new money, amplifying the earlier distortions.”
—Christopher Leonard, The Lords of Easy Money:
How the Federal Reserve Broke the American Economy (2022) (h/t Michael Lewitt)
..
I believe Fed officials are largely responsible for the cycles of bubbles, booms, and busts over the last 30 years. Further, they share some of the blame (clearly not all) for the growing divisions and tribalism in our society. Much of it springs from the wealth disparity they aided and abetted.'
- John Mauldin, (
Source, February 4, 2022)
'..if we wish to build a truly stable financial and monetary system for the twenty-first century..''In conclusion, if we wish to build a truly stable financial and monetary system for the twenty-first century, a system which will protect our economies as far as humanly possible from crises and recessions, we will have to: (1) ensure complete freedom of choice in currency, based on a metallic standard (gold) which would replace all fiduciary media issued in the past; (2) establish a free-banking system; and, most importantly, (3) insist that all agents involved in the free-banking system be subject to and comply with traditional legal rules and principles, especially the principle that no one, not even a banker, can enjoy the privilege of loaning something entrusted to him on demand deposit (i.e., a free-banking system with a 100-percent reserve requirement).
Until specialists and society in general fully grasp the essential theoretical and legal principles associated with money, bank credit, and economic cycles, we may realistically expect further suffering in the world due to damaging economic recessions which will inevitably and perpetually reappear until central banks lose their power to issue paper money with legal tender and bankers lose their government-granted privilege of operating with a fractional reserve. We now wrap up the book as we began it, with this opinion: Now that we have seen the historic fall of socialism, both in theory and in practice, the main challenge to face both professional economists and lovers of freedom in this new century will be to use all of their intellectual might to oppose the institution of the central bank and the privilege private bankers now enjoy.'
- Jesús Huerta de Soto,
Money, Bank Credit, and Economic Cycles (Fourth edition, 2020 (
pdf)), pp. 811-812 -
(Banking Reform - English/Dutch) '..a truly stable financial and monetary system for the twenty-first century..'Context(Stagflation) - '..preposterous that in an economy with 7.5% inflation .. [the Fed] is still .. growing its balance sheet.' - Summers