The Myth: An unregulated free market and unrestricted Wall Street greed caused the Great Depression and only the interventionist policies of Franklin D. Roosevelt got us out. The Reality: The Great Depression was caused by government intervention, above all a financial system controlled by America’s central bank, the Federal Reserve — and the interventionist policies of Hoover and FDR only made things worse.
The Myth: We tried free banking and the result was constant bank runs and panics. The Federal Reserve was created to make the system stable and it succeeded. The Reality: America’s recurrent panics were the product of financial control, and there is no evidence the Federal Reserve has made things better.
Now that Trump is in office there is talk that his administration will support repealing or revising Dodd-Frank — the government’s regulatory response to the financial crisis of 2008. The bill was sold as a way to protect ourselves from future crises by making the financial system more stable.
The consensus among pundits about the Democratic presidential debate is that Hillary Clinton “won” in the sense that she came across as trustworthy, likable, and “presidential.” I’ll leave to readers to ponder the use of words like these to describe someone who has been dissembling about her emails for years now and who angrily dismissed a Congressional investigation into the cause of the Benghazi attacks with “What difference, at this point, does it make?”
The Debt Dialogues is a weekly podcast that aims to educate young people about the welfare state and how it will affect their future. In this episode, the third of a three-part interview, I talk to ARI’s executive director, Yaron Brook, about the financial industry — one of the chief targets of the attacks on economic inequality. Topics include: the myth of financial deregulation, why the Federal Reserve should be abolished and the vital need for a moral defense of finance.
The Debt Dialogues is a weekly podcast that aims to educate young people about the welfare state and how it will affect their future. In this episode, the second of a three-part interview, I talk to ARI’s executive director, Yaron Brook, about the financial industry — one of the chief targets of the attacks on economic inequality. Topics include: the productive contribution of hedge funds, why finance is a top target of the inequality alarmists and the causes of the 2008 Financial Crisis.
The Debt Dialogues is a weekly podcast that aims to educate young people about the welfare state and how it will affect their future. In this episode, the first of a three-part interview, I talk to ARI’s executive director Yaron Brook about the financial industry — one of the chief targets of the attacks on economic inequality. Topics include: the productive role of finance, the meaning of “capital” and why finance is so reviled.
