Forbes Editor-in-Chief and longtime friend Steve Forbes leads off this week’s Outside the Box with a sweeping historical summary – and damning indictment – of the “cheap money†policies of the US executive branch and Federal Reserve. Four decades of fiat money (since Richard Nixon and his Treasury Secretary, John Connally, axed the gold standard in 1971) and six years of Fed funny business have led us, in Steve’s words, to an era of “declining mobility, great inequality, and the destruction of personal wealth.â€
And of course the damage has not been limited to the US; it is global. Steve reminds us that “The bursting of the subprime bubble put in motion a collapse of dominoes that started with the U.S. financial sector and European banks and led to the sovereign debt crisis in Europe, the Greek bankruptcy crisis, and the banking disasters in Iceland and Cyprus.†To make matters worse, the fundamentally weak dollar (and fiat currencies worldwide) have contributed a great deal to record-high food and energy prices that are spurring serious social instability.
As I showed in Code Red and as Steve notes here, we now face the looming specter of a global currency war. Steve reminds us that the real bottom line is that
Money is simply a tool that measures value, like a ruler measures length and a clock measures time. Just as changing the number of inches in a foot will not increase the building of houses or anything else, lowering the value of money will not create more wealth. The only way we will ever get a real recovery is through a return to trustworthy, sound money. And the best way to achieve that is with a gold standard: a dollar linked to gold.
Today’s Outside the Box is from Steve’s latest book, which is simply called Money.
I think it’s Steve’s best book in years. Get it for your summer reading. While there is more than one solution to reining in the current abuses by the major global central banks, Steve highlights the problems as well as anyone. This situation really has the potential to end badly. Just this morning the Wall Street Journal noted that “Reserve Bank of India Governor Raghuram Rajan warned Wednesday that the global economy bears an increasing resemblance to its condition in the 1930s, with advanced economies trying to pull out of the Great Recession at each other’s expense.†Rajan is one of the more highly respected economists in the world.
I am back in Dallas for an extended period of time (at least extended by my standards), where my new apartment is paying off in a less hectic lifestyle – people seem to be coming to me for the next few weeks. Tomorrow my good friend Bill Dunkelberg, the Chief Economist of the National Federation of Independent Business, will drop by for a day. We’re going to talk about the future of work, what kind of jobs will be there for our kids (and increasingly our fellow Boomers), what policies should be developed to encourage more jobs, and a host of other issues.
I’m still trying to absorb what I learned in Maine. We enjoyed the most beautiful weather we’ve had in the last eight years, and the conversations seemed to take it up a notch. I fished more than usual, too, which gave me more time to think. On Sunday, however, my thought process was not disturbed by so much as a nibble on my hook. That was after the previous two days, when the fish were practically jumping into the boat.
We had a discussion on complexity theory and why complexity actually had a hand in bringing down more than 20 civilizations. I understand the argument but think there is more to it than that. Something can be complex but continue to work smoothly if information is allowed to run “noise-free.†I began to ponder whether our government has become so complex that it has begun to stifle the flow of information. Dodd–Frank. The Affordable Care Act. Energy policy. The list goes on and on and on. Are we taking all of the profit out of the system in order to comply with complex rules and regulations? Not for large companies, necessarily, but for small ones? When we are losing companies faster than new ones are being created, that should be a huge warning flag that something is wrong in the system. The data in this chart ends in 2011, but the pictures is not getting better.
It will be good to see my old friend Dunk, and perhaps he can shed some light on my continually confused state. Enjoy your August.
John Mauldin, Editor
Outside the Box [email protected]
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