PFMPE? RESPONSE TO PAUL CRAIG ROBERTS’S ARTICLE, “A SOLUTION?”
Paul Craig Roberts begins today’s article, “A Solution?” stating,
“Readers have been pressing for a solution to the financial crisis. But first it is necessary to understand the problem. Here is the problem as I see it. If my diagnosis is correct, the solution below might be appropriate.“
He doesn’t get any further than that before getting into trouble:
Let?s begin with the fact that the financial crisis is more or less worldwide. The mechanism that spread the American-made financial crisis abroad was the massive US trade deficit.
Only of course if there were no further cause for our decline from trade surpluses to perpetual escalating trade deficits, could we be raising here the primary cause which our solution must address. The incumbent and missing argument therefore must establish there is no further underlying cause. Finding that cause is always the first preparatory step of solution.
The proposition of a further fundamental cause is readily recognized, if not from my answer, from analysis of how industry has fared in markets entirely within the country.
Mr. Roberts then goes on to reason (in part quite correctly) that:
Does the US have the leadership to realize the problem and to deal with it?
Not if Bush, Cheney, Paulson, Bernanke, McCain and Obama are the best leadership that America can produce.
The Great Depression lasted a decade because the authorities were unable to comprehend that the Federal Reserve had allowed the supply of money to shrink. The shrunken money supply could not employ the same number of workers at the same wages, and it could not purchase the same amount of goods and service at the same prices. Thus, prices and employment fell.
The explanation of the Great Depression was not known until the 1960s when Milton Friedman and Anna Schwartz published their Monetary History of the United States. Given the stupidity of our leadership and the stupidity of so many of our economists, we may learn what happened to us this year in 2038, three decades from now.
Now he’s hot on the trail of the cause here; he can’t just stop there. Yes, an inadequate money supply will itself bring an “economy” to ruin, because we won’t be able to service our obligations, and particularly therefore, whatever our debt.
But it is not only an inadequate money supply (circulation) which can render ruin. Ever greater dedication of the money supply to servicing debt leave ever less of the circulation to sustain the industry which (directly or indirectly) is obliged to service the sum of debt.
Thus we must ask at least how ever more of the circulation is dedicated to servicing a sum of debt; and the only immediate observation to be made in regard to that matter is that given any consistent rate of interest, the sum of debt must be increasing in relation to our finite capacity (or the circulation), with which we can service the debt so long as the escalating sum of debt does not exceed us.
Mr. Roberts therefore is hot on the trail of the problem; and I encourage he and others to finish the search.
But he thus concludes his article, to which I respond:
PFMPE?
I have no idea what cause of the First Great Depression Friedman could have published, for he certainly never advocated eradication of interest.
When you worked for President Reagan, I provided that Administration computer models which projected he would triple the national debt, and which accurately project, from 1980s numbers, the accumulation of debt to now.
Debt multiplies in proportion to a circulation as we are compelled to perpetually re-borrow interest and principal as subsequent sums of debt, increased so much as periodic interest. Thus the sum of debt increases at an inherently ever escalating rate, in proportion to our finite capacity to service debt, until a terminal sum of debt is engendered.
In 1929, the markets fell when the Federal Reserve refused to lend any more money for speculation financed by this process. As the short term debts were incurred at margin, the market had no option but to liquidate its holdings; and it could only sell them to a market deprived of the further capital necessary to buy them at previous prices, necessary to pay the resultant debts. Of course the market collapsed.
Today the market has been sustained falsely since even before the 1987 crash. While the powers that be have heralded expansion, we have seen our industry and jobs expatriated. Today, the market is collapsing because all the facades are coming down in the wake of the last of the general economy to withstand the multiplication of debt upon the whole ball of wax.
If the Fed had not terminated further credit in 1929, the markets would have crashed ultimately for the same reasons they are now.
So, unless Friedman advocated solution of inflation and deflation, systemic manipulation of the cost or value of money or property, and inherent multiplication of debt by interest, he hardly would have identified the cause we need to identify to solve our current problems.
As to the void of leadership, absolute and singular solution has been available for 30 years *before* the present specter of collapse.
I assert that I could stop the fall in a day and rectify the system in little more. The real problem may be that the American People (too many of them sleeping as they are in any case) might not be inclined to identify a real solution if it is staring them in the face.
We cannot save anything if we do not save “the economy” from the primary causes of its failure: 1)?inflation and deflation, 2)?systemic manipulation of the cost or value of money or property, and 3)?inherent, irreversible multiplication of debt in proportion to a circulation.
The solution which has been waiting for the republic for 30 years ??and the only integral solution ??is mathematically perfected economy?.
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- A Solution? Paul Craig Roberts at ICH
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- IF I WERE PRESIDENT ??HOW I WOULD FIX OUR MONETARY ISSUES IN SHORT ORDER, AND WITHOUT COST
“To find the players in all the corruption of the world, ‘Follow the money.’ To find the captains of world corruption, follow the money all the way.”
mike montagne ??founder, PEOPLE For Mathematically Perfected Economy?, author/engineer of mathematically perfected economy? (1979)
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