At Bretton Woods the US had promised to be the world’s reserve currency backed by gold. But the Fed had created far more dollars than it could ever redeem in gold. And now the US could no longer keep that promise. ibid.
For the first time in history the dollar was just a piece of paper backed only by faith in the Federal Reserve and its policies. That promise was only as good as the Fed actions behind it … The dollar lost more than half its value. ibid.
What followed was the longest economic expansion and largest stock market boom in US history. ibid.
The Trouble with Bubbles: Japan was a cautionary tale of what can happen when stock market real estate bubbles explode in a frenzy of speculation, as they did in Tokyo in the 1980s. ibid.
Greenspan’s ideology won out … The nation’s most powerful banking regulator considered regulation itself obsolete. ibid.
He quickly responded with a series of interest rate cuts to soften the blow. ibid.
‘The Federal Reserve ended up encouraging a housing boom.’ ibid. Bill Poole
The greatest credit bubble in history. ibid.
Able to borrow money for nothing and earning huge fees for lending it out, Wall Street began simply giving money away. ibid.
‘It was a Ponzi scheme connived in by federal agencies. ibid.
‘The Bernanke Fed really blew it. They didn’t see it coming.’ ibid. commentator
The Problem with Models: A bank run but one that bore relation to those of the past involving not just the banks the Fed was created up to protect but the hedge funds, investment banks and insurance conglomerate the Fed had allowed to hide from its oversight. ibid.
Transitioning from an inflationary world to a deflationary world – people should be scared. There is going to be disruption and that disruption is coming no matter what. There is nothing fundamental that governments can do to stop the rate of technology progress. Jeff Booth, interview The Keiser Report, author The Price of Tomorrow: Why Deflation is the Key to an Abundant Future, RT August 2020
You have technology moving at an exponential pace driving prices down, and governments all around the world [are] caught in an inflationary trap that they created themselves out of monetary policy, fighting that force. And I would ask a simple question – isn’t it good when the value of your money goes up, and prices go down? ibid.
The abundance of technology would be broadly distributed. ibid.
It’s not going to go on for ever no matter what … It doesn’t matter until it does. One giant thing they miss that this is they assume a reserve currency goes on for ever, right, and you can just keep printing and people just trust in your currency. ibid.
What if a country, let’s say China, created a currency and decided to keep on printing for ever, and they used the currency and they used it to buy the world? … Would we trust that currency? ibid.
And so you can see from that thought experiment that if you just keep on printing money, people lose faith in your currency, and so you don’t have a reserve currency any more. So there’s a whole bunch of people like I think are like brainwashed in this ‘debt doesn’t matter’, that this can go on for ever. And it’s going to happen gradually … There is nothing that can that stop this. We are going to have deflation for sure. Structurally, technology requires it. The path to get to deflation could end up through hyper-inflation first – currency default, debt default – it could happen a whole bunch of different ways but we are going to have deflation anyhow. ibid.
The concentration of wealth because you’re fighting a natural force – Capitalism can’t work, right, so effectively the Government is the market today. Free market principles don’t work any more. ibid.
Deflation we’ve never seen in our lifetimes. What if next year everything around you got cheaper? All it does is increase the value of your savings, and decrease the value of your assets. ibid.
Why do you think the top five technology companies are at historic heights? ibid.
Everybody knows it. ibid.
More band-aids on a systematic, a structural change that has to take place. And so what they’re really trying to stop is a revolution, right, but they’re making the revolution more likely. ibid.
The US dollar as the world’s reserve currency: are we on the threshold of an era where it is no longer the world’ reserve currency after a one hundred year run? The Keiser Report 2020
My job is to deliver suitcases with counterfeit bills, fake dollars. They bring me the suitcase already packed, they call me up. Trafficked with Mariana van Zeller s1e3, Counterfeitters, National Geographic 2020
Lima, Peru: Every city has its secrets. Lima is no different. Over the last decade a new criminal enterprise has taken root, and a new breed of gangsta craftsman has emerged. ibid.
Incredibly, it’s estimated that 60% of all fake US bills are produced in Peru. ibid.
For all of our lives the dollar has been the king of currencies around the world but is that about to change? What’s happening to the all-mighty American dollar? … More and more countries are making deals to trade oil in other currencies as an alternative to the dollar. The Bottom Line: Are Fears About a Dying Dollar Exaggerated? Youtube 24.00, Al Jazeera 2023
August 15th 1971: ‘I have directed the Secretary of the Treasury to take the action necessary to defend the dollar against the speculators … to suspend temporarily the convertibility of the dollar into gold …’ Richard Nixon, cited End of the Road: How Money Became Worthless, Nixon, Youtube 55.44, Endevr 2012