As the Chairman of the Federal Reserve from 2006-2014, he decided in the aftermath of the Global Financial Crisis that the banking system had to be saved, by any means necessary. To finance the massive losses – which were over $10 trillion in the U.S. alone – the world’s central banks began printing money and buying government bonds to finance massive bailouts.
Like squirrels watching a bank robbery, the members of the Nobel Committee – which recently awarded Bernanke the prize in economics – saw everything that happened and knew nothing about what it meant.
Printing money doesn’t cure economic problems: it simply skews who pays for them.
Printing trillions to paper over the financial system’s losses moved the egregious errors of Bank of America, Bear Stearns, Lehman Brothers, Goldman Sachs, AIG, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, General Electric, General Motors and others from their balance sheets, onto the balance sheet of the U.S. Treasury and the Federal Reserve.
Morally these actions are repugnant – much like requiring that taxpayers finance hundreds of billions’ worth of second-rate college educations for 10 million lazy, underachieving students – but on a vastly bigger scale.
The real problem isn’t financial. Printing money changes societies by giving the government virtually unlimited amounts of power. That warps the ambitions of politicians and gives socialists unlimited budgets. People soon believe every problem can be solved by the government and the printing press. Trade-offs are no longer required. Costs are no longer relevant. In this kind of environment, no problem is too big to solve through politics and the central bank. And if there isn’t a crisis, then one will soon be invented.
And, sure enough, as soon as the U.S. central bank began to sell assets and return to “normal” policies in 2018 and 2019, a new, even bigger crisis was “found.”
A novel coronavirus. Never mind that coronaviruses appear all the time and that most people will get and survive the flu a half dozen times in their lives… this time the world went completely nuts.
Everything was shut down for two years – except politics. Trillions were spent on vaccines – vaccines that don’t prevent you from getting Covid or from transmitting Covid. It was definitely a government vaccine: it cost trillions, everyone was forced to use it, and it didn’t work.
Nothing else worked during the Covid lockdown either. Kids don’t learn at home. Employees don’t work at home. Flimsy surgical masks don’t prevent you from contracting or spreading Covid – they don’t work, but they were required too. Fauci wore two masks, everywhere. He received four different shots of the “vaccine.” Guess who got Covid anyway?
Worst of all, the government spent unlimited sums of money on things like the ridiculous “paycheck protection program,” which might as well have been called “Fraud on a Federal Scale For You.”
The lie that we could print over the mortgage losses led directly to the lie that wearing a paper mask can stop a virus. Or that a vaccine created in a few weeks and tested only on a handful of people could stop a coronavirus that constantly mutates. With a printing press, there’s no problem that appears too big for the government to handle.
But, much like the “vaccine” and the paper masks, the printing press is just a lie too.
Altogether, the world’s central banks have printed over $25 trillion over the last 12 years.
In the United States, the printing was equal to more than 30% of our GDP. In the Eurozone, the printing was twice as large – over 60% of GDP. In Japan, the printing has been equal to over 100% of GDP.
You can think of these figures as being the size of the mirage we’ve been living in.
Reality looms.
This is why the Sino-Russian alliance is going to win WWIII. They not only have the advantages of population, territory, social stability, and manufacturing capacity, but they also have the advantage of not being hamstrung by completely screwed-up economic systems.
Capitalism has completely and utterly failed, as what presently passes for capitalism is nothing more than a massive credit-fueled Ponzi scheme.
