Lionel Robbins!!! Everyone should know who Lionel Robbins was. He chaired LSE* Economics from ~1929-~1940, which was during the time of the great debates between Keynes and is students at Cambridge and Robbins and Hayek (whom Robbins hired) and their students at the LSE. First Robbins, and later Hayek, were eventually generous in their acknowledgement of Keynes accomplishments, though during the 1930s period the rivalry got so intense they all (particularly Keynes) stooped to veiled insults aimed at their adversaries. Several among Keynes students at the time of the Cambridge-LSE debates became famous economists. I am thinking now of Joan Robinson, but the other names, and there are several, escape me. Today, I would advise anyone to not waste time reading any of Hayek or Robbins unless due to an interest in the history of economic argument, because so much of "Austrian School" economics is just plain wrong. (Obsolescent Austrian School economics is still holding the Germans back!, but I see cracks beginning to form.) _________________ * The LSE was founded in 1895, by British, upper crust members of the Fabian Society. The Fabian Society was named after Roman General "Quintus Fabius Maximus Verracosus". Their logo = the Tortoise; their mascot = a wolf in sheep's clothing! Wiki says the latter was dropped because of "negative connotation." Got to love Wiki. I know nothing of the LSE's current academic offerings other than that they extend in the Social Sciences far beyond economics. For example, George Soros was extremely interested in Philosophy when studying at the LSE, and Carl Popper, whom Soros has often mentioned as someone whose work had influenced him greatly, was on the faculty at the LSE at the same time Soros was there. I did not realize until recently however that Soros did not actually meet Popper until after he graduated.
Blah! Economics... the most dismal "science" ever. You're better off studying alchemy in today's day and age which is saying something.
Without spending hours, it is impossible to give an accurate appraisal of what's presented is truth, what is a half truth, and what is nonsense. It seems that it must be nearly all nonsense because the entire piece is premised on the Fed having far more power than it has. Just for starters, the truth is that the fed can not create a so much as a dime. By law, the only government body that can create money is the House of Representatives. It does that when it decides the level of taxation and the level of spending in consultation with and concurrence of the Senate. Spending is of course the manifestation of "fiscal policy". The Fed prints money in the same sense that your home computer creates printed paper by using the printer it's connected to entirely independent of you. It doesn't, and neither can the Fed print money without the Congress. In actual fact the Fed has zero say about how much gets printed, that's entirely up to Congress. What does the Fed do then? lots of things of course, but a key function is the adjustment of the ratio of outside money in its readily spendable form to money in its interest paying, non-readily spendable form as Treasuries. This adjustment effects M2, a measure of "the money supply" because Treasuries are not a part of M2. (They have low propensity to be spent. Higher propensity to be spent is a criterion used to define M2 -- which is somewhat arbitrary and can change from time to time, as it has in the past.) "Inside money", or "Bank money?" is created when a bank makes a loan but disappears when the loan is paid off. Bank money is temporary money, whereas "Outside money" is permanent until Congress taxes it out of the economy; so it is semi-permanent. Outside money is money that was created by The House as new money when it was deficit spent or deficit transferred into the economy. New Inside money does not represent an expansion of the total semi-permanent money in the economy because it is paired with a corresponding private sector liability. It is created by letting more than one entity use the same pile of money in a synchronous but not simultaneous way. That's what fractional reserve baking is all about and it's what's enabled the rapid expansion of democratic, private sector economies. That's why you don't have to save for a lifetime before you can buy a house!!! Think about that!
Haha Germany's debt to gdp ratio is half the U.S. They need to stop holding back and print, print, print huh? No Fed money printing machine (yes THEY do) for them because of that Euro thingie kinda restrains them and the rest of the EU zone somewhat.
For the gist, ran the transcript through LLM, return mindmaps of main concepts.. Main concepts: Rhetorical devices used:
In a similar vein but with a more mechanistic perspective of the relationships, "The True Cost of the Dollar Empire w/ Lyn Alden" is a worthy listen. It's one of the clearest illuminations of the relationships between the role and functions of the Federal Reserve, Trade Deficit, Currency Intervention, US Treasuries, Tariffs, De-Dollarization, etc. Refreshing free of political extremism. She's also the author of "Broken Money" and while she is a Bitcoin proponent doesn't come across as a kool-aid drinking BTC/Maxi - high signal to noise content. Run through a similar pipeline A drill-down of one of the broader concepts Lyn touches on about Money Supply, Markets and Liquidity: Here's a small sampling of Conks Concodanomics brilliant diagrams that illustrate "The Market's Plumbing" U.S. Treasury cash-futures basis trade visualized The Secondary Market for U.S. Treasuries The Repo Market Visualized FX Swap Flows Visualized