Macleans of Canada asks Is America Going Broke?. What is notable about this story is not so much the topic. Austrian Economists have been forecasting the failure of the dollar-based fiat money system since the Bretton Woods system was instituted – see for example Hazlitt’s out of print From Bretton Woods to World Inflation, and Hans Hoppe’s Banking, Nation States and International Politics: A Sociological Reconstruction of the Present Economic Order. What is notable is that this theme is starting to penetrate the mainstream media. The writer of this story picks up most of the main points of the argument, including the level of denial that exists around the inevitable outcome.
For a more in-depth exploration of the scenarios that could unfold as the imbalances of the current system hit the wall, listen to this two-part conversation, The Great Inflation on Financial Sense News Hour between Jim Puplava and Frank Barbera, both investment fund managers (part 1, part 2). Puplava and Barbera examine in some depth international credit and currency markets to pinpoint where the stresses are in the international monetary system, and speculate about how it will play out. See also Puplava’s essay on this topic.
Jeff Ferguson does as good a job as anyone could of explaining the Austrian Business Cycle Theory in a four-minute radio interview. The host is clearly sympathetic to his viewpoint and understands what he is saying.
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Despite the fact that America’s impending financial collapse is finally a topic of public discussion, people have a long way to go in discussing realistic remedies.
“The available options to close the fiscal gap? Hike income taxes by 78 per cent;” reads one quote from the article. Hah, I’ll wager that such an increase would result in very little extra income for the US government. It would murder the economy, however, and put an even larger strain on welfare.
There is an article in Foreign Affairs (“The Overstretch Myth”) arguing that all this worrying about the defecit and the current account is overblown:
http://www.foreignaffairs.org/20050301facomment84201/david-h-levey-stuart-s-brown/the-overstretch-myth.html
The authors don’t seem to grasp that Asian central banks are propping this whole system up but that they are taking huge hits as their dollar denominated assets tank. At some point, it’s likely that they’ll decide to stop buying and holding poorly performing investments which will cause an increase in interest rates and a fall in the dollar. At the same time, they sort of do. It’s worth reading if only to get a dissenting point of view.
On the end game of the current system, the papers by Roubini are also quite worthwhile. I did a blog entry on them a while back http://blog.mises.org/blog/archives/003198.asp. He pretty much devastates the arguments used in the Foreign Affairs piece.
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