The Federal Reserve continues to throw gas on the fire claiming it can pull the gas back out if the fire gets out of control. Good luck.

Rand Paul and Peter Schiff respond to the erroneous claim that inflation is not a problem and that we should really be concerned about deflation. Also, Sean Ryan, a liberty activist from Boston, talks about his confrontations with Barney Frank and the president of the Cleveland Federal Reserve Bank.

The Federal Reserve has increased the monetary base to an unprecedented level. If that money works its way through the economy, we will see inflation. Bernanke claims that the Fed can reduce the money supply if necessary, but Rand Paul suspects that if stagflation occurs (high inflation plus a slow economy), the Fed will not be willing to reduce the money supply.

At the root of the problem is the fact that the Federal Reserve claims to control inflation, when it is really the vehicle for inflation.

via Confronting the Myth of Deflation | Wendy Macy’s Blog.

Being a huge UFC fan, this analogy has to be my favorite of all time.

I’ll borrow an analogy from Peter Schiff. Imagine if you will a victim at the unfortunate end of a Brock Lesnar knuckle sandwich. The blow has knocked him out cold and the medics try to revive him. The best suggestion they can come up with is to have Lesnar pound the man’s head even harder with his fists. When the man has seizures from the repeated pounding, a medic (coincidently named Bernanke) screams gleefully “Hurray, he’s moving.”

Sadly, such is the response to our present crisis by the policy makers in Washington, DC. To solve a problem caused by malinvestments resulting from easy credit at 1 percent interest rates, the Fed is supplying even more easy money at 0.25 percent. None of the malinvestments have been allowed to be liquidated.

Housing prices have been propped up, banks and auto companies have been bailed out, regulations have been increased, debt covenants have been violated, unemployment insurance has been extended. In addition, there’s the cap-and-trade bill, the healthcare bill, and a “czar” around every corner.

All of these increase the already-humongous burden on wealth creators. In short, the problems that caused the Great Recession have been compounded. Real output must then necessarily decline. How can anyone logically assert that we are in the beginning of a recovery?

via A Path To Runaway US Inflation – Ganesh Rathnam – Mises Institute.

Just found this video on YouTube. YouTube just rocks. As I like to say, THANK GOD FOR THE FREE MARKET. YouTube would have never been developed by socialists.

Fannie Mae announced a new “deed for lease” program, where they will take your deed and rent your house back to  you if you don’t qualify for a loan modification and can prove you can’t pay your mortgage. They will sign a one year lease with the current owners. They are hoping they can then sell off the houses a year from now, when they assume the housing market will be better and the value of the homes will be higher. This is some pretty optimistic thinking from a now government owned institution.

What would make them think the housing market is going to pick up that much over the next year. So far, unemployment continues to rise. The Fed has been busy at the printing press, and the government is taking debt levels into unknown waters. More than likely if the economy begins to pick backup, we are going to have massive inflation. That will lead to two scenarios. Either we’ll have hyperinflation that makes the 70s look like child’s play, or we’ll have a Fed induced recession to bring inflation under control. Neither scenario paints a pretty picture for a booming housing market.

Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac (Freddie is already doing something similar) are only delaying the inevitable. The market is much smarter than the government is. It will take into account that these government institutions have a ton of inventory being hidden from the market, what analyst call “shadow” inventory. If the housing market begins to pick up, it will be driven back down with this excess inventory. Instead, Fannie should take the short term pain and end it quick.

Because of Fannie’s mistakes it is asking the government (me and you) for another $15 billion after a quarterly loss of $18.9 billion. In total, it’s estimated that we will have wasted $200 billion on both Fannie and Freddie by the time this mess is over. Then again, we know how reliable government estimates are. So far we have handed over $61 billion to Fannie, and estimates are that Fannie is sitting on inventory around 65,000 homes.

Instead of becoming landlords, why doesn’t Fannie and Freddie sell of packages of houses as investment bundles. This would get the houses off their books, and it would bring them back into the free market where they can begin to stabilize the market. Investors will buy theses homes, and guess what they’ll have to do? They have to pay taxes on their profits, which ultimately will help with the government losses that will occur with the sale. With the investors holding properties, they will want to drive prices up. They’ll either rent them out, which investors are better at than the government, or they will fix up the homes and put them back on the market. Investors will not shoot themselves in the foot by flooding the market. They will slowly bring the houses onto the market to maximize sale prices and make the most profit. Whether renting or selling, the investor will be paying taxes on his capital gains.

The government should just take the short term pain of selling them off now? This may hurt the housing market, but it will be over and stabilization can begin. Instead, the government is prolonging this crisis and making it worse, and who’s going to eat this mess? We are.

Translation: “We are going to continue to print money in hopes of tricking consumers and businesses into spending money. We know it will create false growth and the possibility for hyperinflation, but we are so smart we can stop it by driving the economy back into recession. Trust us. Look how good we’ve been at this.”

BY JON HILSENRATH

The Federal Reserve affirmed its plan to keep interest rates “exceptionally low” for a long time despite signs of economic recovery. But the Fed began to lay rhetorical groundwork for an eventual shift in its stance, suggesting that when the unemployment rate falls or if expectations of inflation turn up, it could change course.

“Economic activity has continued to pick up,” the Fed said in a statement following a two-day meeting. It noted that consumer spending has improved, housing activity has increased and businesses were retrenching at a slower pace.

Fed officials voted unanimously to maintain their target for the …

via Fed to Keep Rates Low Despite Pickup – WSJ.com.

Finally, I finished Robert P. Murphy’s “The Politically Incorrect Guide to Capitalism“.  It’s a small book, but I read too many books at once. The book was great for those average Joes, like me, who love the free market and want to defend it but don’t have the time to get a Ph.D in economics.

Robert explains why capitalism works best, why the government doesn’t, and why most government regulations have the opposite effect it claims to have.

The last section provides the reader with a 12 step program to help them break their government addiction. They are as follows:

1. Admit that government “solutions” are a problem.
2. Have faith that human beings can interact peacefully, and that economic blessings are available to all.
3. Surrender to the fact that certain social ills cannot be eradicated by force or political “will”.
4. Ask yourself, “Do I want to advocate self-sufficiency and voluntary means, or do I want to look to politicians every time I don’t like something?”
5. Survey the past record of governments when it comes to economic “planning” or other alleged improvements.
6. Learn to look for hidden costs of government intervention, rather than the superficial benefits.
7. Understand the role of market prices (read my root causes of health care crisis blog), and why tampering with them interferes with the job they have to perform.
8. Study history. Examine whether governments that violated private property rights stayed out of their citizens’ other affairs.
9. Before condemning a market outcome as unjust, first understand why it occur (read my blog on mortgage crisis).
10. Study other “spontaneous” social institutions, such as language and science, where no one is “in charge” and yet the outcome is quite orderly.
11. When politicians propose a new program, remember how much they said it would cost at the outset. Compare that number to the actual amount spent.
12. Go through the newspaper and discover how government meddling causes or exacerbates the conflict in virtually every story.

As you can see, if you follow Robert’s 12 step program, you will undoubtedly come to the conclusion that the free market handles our societal ills much better than government. These 12 steps are great, but you should read the book first. That way you’ll no why these 12 steps are right. It’s a quick read. Pick one up, and be prepared to defend free market capitalism.

Also, check out Robert’s blog Free Advice for more good info. This economist can even be funny sometimes.

**** Before the FTC cracks down on me. I just finished reading the book, and I paid for the book myself. Robert was nice enough to answer a couple questions I had. That doesn’t count as paid advertising does it? Guess it depends if Big O likes my blog.

In a very long article in the Wall Street Journal today, they are highlighting a supposed genius economist who is developing a new paradigm of thinking of how the markets work and in particular the use of leverage by banks. Unfortunately, in the entire article, the writer and apparently the economist never mentions monetary policy, negative interest rates, or incentives and their effects on behavior. These supposed geniuses start off with the assumption that the market is irrational and just decides to go haywire out of the blue. They completely ignore incentives and how the change in incentives changes behavior. The new paradigm was reached a while ago. Someone tell this genius to grab some books and read up on Austrian economics.

Mr. Geanakoplos is among a small band of academics offering new thinking about those cycles. A varied group ranging from finance specialists to abstract theorists, they are moving to economic center stage after years on the margins. The goal: Fix the models that encapsulate economists’ understanding of the world and serve as policy-making tools at the world’s biggest central banks. It is a task that could require a thorough overhaul of the way those models work.

via Crisis Compels Economists To Reach for New Paradigm – WSJ.com.

Ron Paul, who seems to be the only politician with a clue, writes in Forbes about how the Fed is the cause of our current crisis, and how they are doing the same thing now that they did to create this crisis. Many talk about our current crisis as the result of building the housing boom out of house of cards. What happens when you find out your entire currency and banking system is built out of the same cards?

Be Prepared for the Worst

Ron Paul, 10.29.09, 09:20 AM EDT

Forbes Magazine dated November 16, 2009

The large-scale government intervention in the economy is going to end badly.

Any number of pundits claim that we have now passed the worst of the recession. Green shoots of recovery are supposedly popping up all around the country, and the economy is expected to resume growing soon at an annual rate of 3% to 4%. Many of these are the same people who insisted that the economy would continue growing last year, even while it was clear that we were already in the beginning stages of a recession.

A false recovery is under way. I am reminded of the outlook in 1930, when the experts were certain that the worst of the Depression was over and that recovery was just around the corner. The economy and stock market seemed to be recovering, and there was optimism that the recession, like many of those before it, would be over in a year or less. Instead, the interventionist policies of Hoover and Roosevelt caused the Depression to worsen, and the Dow Jones industrial average did not recover to 1929 levels until 1954. I fear that our stimulus and bailout programs have already done too much to prevent the economy from recovering in a natural manner and will result in yet another asset bubble.

via Be Prepared for the Worst – Forbes.com.

Ron Paul to Geithner: Fed as Lender of Last Resort Contributes to

Many anti-fed economists have been predicting massive inflation with the way the Fed has grown the money supply in order to deal with this current crisis. With all their warnings, I decided to look at GDP, growth of the monetary base, and inflation to see how historically they related to each other. To make it simple, I took it by decade, but there is always a delay. The averages may not show for the decade, but there is definitely a correlation over the long term.

As you can see, inflation is always very close to growth in the monetary base minus the growth in GDP. If you take the averages of all years from 1960 to 2006, you can see the historical correllation. Keep in mind this includes the inflation of the 70s and early 80s, and it still works out. You will notice over the long haul, inflation equals growth in the monetary base minus growth in GDP (7% – 3% = 4%).

Now, let’s look at what has happened from 2007 to today.

So, as you can see the monetary base has grown an average of 38%. Most of that growth has taken place in the past year with the monetary base growing at 100%

If the history of how these three indicators correlate with each other is correct, you better invest in an inflation hedge. It’s going to get ugly.