Saturday, July 24, 2010

The 60-Year-Old Bubble


At Business Insider, Gregory White and Kamelia Angelova write:

Worries are expanding over whether or not the global economic recovery is going to be able to persist with banks not lending to consumers. That lack of lending is a result of individuals, corporations, and banks preferring to pay off old debts rather than take on new debt or provide new loans.

That's just one more way to say the economy will not recover until we get rid of some of this existing debt. So again I say, let's not have the Federal Reserve print money and use it to buy up debt. Have them use that money to pay off debt.

The Business Insider article also quotes Christopher Laird:

The point of emphasizing it's from the end of WW2 is that we are not talking merely about a banking crisis, or whatever. We are talking about the deleveraging of the greatest economic/finance bubble in history.

Since the end of World War II, we have been restricting the quantity of money in circulation and encouraging the use of credit. These policies are directly responsible for increasing leverage and for creating "the greatest economic/finance bubble in history."

The policies have to change.

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