Time to end the Keynesian pretense about fiscal stimulus

Reuters ^ | 19 Sept 2011 | Christopher Whalen

[Palter]

“The U.S. can pay any debt because we can always print more money.”

–Alan Greenspan
Meet the Press
August 7, 2011

Last week, Nouriel Roubini released a paper, “A Radical Policy Response to the Rising Risks of a Depression and Financial Crisis.” He writes: “Data suggest that developed and emerging markets alike are heading for a massive slowdown in growth, with advanced economies already slumping to stall speed.” Roubini is right, but for the wrong reasons.

Government intervention is the root cause of the financial crisis and the maladies identified by Roubini. Many of his proposals, such as debt restructuring and maintaining liquidity to solvent borrowers, are common sense initiatives that ought to be followed immediately. But the proposals by Roubini and others that governments should borrow and print even more fiat currency to fuel further fiscal stimulus are badly considered. Economists from Paul Krugman in the US to Adam Posen in the UK all call for more stimuli. They are all wrong.

First, when Roubini, Posen et al call for additional fiscal stimulus, we need to ask them why. The vast fiscal stimulus already attempted in the US failed miserably in terms of creating permanent jobs. More fiscal stimulus funded with debt will not generate real growth. Remember the idea of public deficits “crowding out” private investment? Huge public deficits actually kill private investment and increase inflation, but you will never hear the neo-Keynesians admit to it.

[MNJohnnie]

All these Junk Economists, like Paul Krugman, need to read this book. This “spend our way to prosperity” dogma has failed every time it has been tried. Latest example would be Japan in the 1990s.

Japan's Lost Decade: Origins, Consequences and Prospects for Recovery By Gary Saxonhouse and Robert Stern

[G Larry]

OH!
I thought you said “Kenyan”.....
...which would have had no affect on the accuracy of the statement...

[theBuckwheat]

“Inflation and credit expansion, the preferred methods of present day government openhandedness, do not add anything to the amount of resources available. They make some people more prosperous, but only to the extent that they make others poorer.” Ludwig von Mises,

“In the absence of the gold standard, there is no way to protect savings from confiscation through inflation. There is no safe store of value. If there were, the government would have to make its holding illegal, as was done in the case of gold. If everyone decided, for example, to convert all his bank deposits to silver or copper or any other good, and thereafter declined to accept checks as payment for goods, bank deposits would lose their purchasing power and government-created bank credit would be worthless as a claim on goods. The financial policy of the welfare state requires that there be no way for the owners of wealth to protect themselves.

“This is the shabby secret of the welfare statists’ tirades against gold. Deficit spending is simply a scheme for the confiscation of wealth. Gold stands in the way of this insidious process. It stands as a protector of property rights. If one grasps this, one has no difficulty in understanding the statists’ antagonism toward the gold standard.”

From the last two paragraphs of Gold and Economic Freedom by Alan Greenspan. 1966.

see: http://www.constitution.org/mon/greenspan_gold.htm

[Eva]

Keynes was very popular among the communists in the US government during the post war period (and probably earlier). He helped Harry Dexter White, from the treasury dept, set up the IMF and the trade policy that favors other nations over the US, allowing all gov’ts except the US to subsidize industries and in other wise manipulate trade.

Keynes was the original redistributionist and the communists all loved him.