I’m mostly interested in things that involve statistical distributions such as demographics and things that influence those distributions such as interactions with public policy such as tax policy. I don’t do any formal research on these types of things, it’s just a hobby. Most of my research is in medicine. But as PhD statistician I get collaborations in social stuff as well. I like and understand economics and am happy to be able to predict how Bernanke is going to respond to a question before he responds. Russo's film gave credibility to the 1913 scam and you can see it percolating through the system today.
It also helps to understand how the demographic changes are going to play out in the coming tax and entitlement reform. When I saw that FDT (and he is an extraordinary intellect btw) was aware of these things, I got excited that we may see an opportunity for a big improvement in our lives coming. I don't go for Perkins type utopia, he never got to discussing it and besides it's not real.
Perkins makes some accurate obversations and then weaves a story around those observations. He says Saddam was our man. Well Saddam was the KGBs man and he was also France’s man and etc.
He says Nixon took the United States off the gold standard (true), and the de facto money standard became oil (true). But then he goes on to say the Saudis cut a deal with Americans that oil would only be sold in USD. I don’t buy that one. That happened as a result of America’s prominence in the world after WWII as well as their oil know-how and work ethic before and after WWII. Americans were smart. They knew the tribal rivalries in parts of the Middle East and they knew the history of how one pipeline was blown up after another. What the President of ARAMCO did was to get advice that the one thing Arabs don't do (and alot of other people in the world as well) is to destroy someone else's ricebowl meaning their agriculture. So ARAMCO put water irrigation mains next to oil pipelines. Any hothead Arab trying to blowup an oil pipeline would then also damage the water mains and that would incur the wrath of the locals. The locals guarded the oil pipelines with their life.
That kind of planning was what made Americans the big influence there.
But then France became a big influence as well. So I think Perkins went overboard in claiming this was solely America's backwater.
I appreciate having your view. Perkins was all over the map but I thought it interesting his talk about the hitmen/jackal in South America. The idea of lending too much money they have no hope of paying back and then using that debt as leverage to get other stuff makes for an interesting story. There are three parts in all btw, locatable by typing his name in the search. I did pick up on his Peace Corp hippy utopia bent and wondered how someone like that gets to work for IMF/World Bank in the first place, much less as a “hit man.” Seems he would not even be their type.