Since we are still in a Global Economic World Wide Depression I'm wondering what the general consensus is out there regarding:
1) What caused it (primarily)
2) What is your plan to get out of it (includes any laws or programs you would add or repeal)
I'll post my program after I put some finishing touches on it.
1) Printing money will-nilly.
2) STOP!
Simple, brief, yes... But added complexity wouldn't help anything.
So a deflationary panic meltdown of the market by cutting off all new credit?
This would result in millions of deaths and probably WWIII.
Try again.
Because without an excess of credit, the wealth it represents would disappear.
Yeah, this is a massive simplification. Honestly, the correct answer under the ideal conditions would be "End legal tender", "End most federal agencies (assuming we are recovering the US economy", "Cut taxes" and "Pull out of any international organizations that would attempt to stop the US from doing this for being a so-called tax haven (UN, World Bank, etc)" in that order. Without doing that, the best option would be "No bailouts, wait out recession, then jack up rates to clear out excess credit" (Kind of like the Volcker solution).
Volckner solved less than he caused. His actions devastated the industrial sector of the USA while chasing phantoms of inflation. Inflation is about 13th on what the average person should be demanding out of a central bank policy. In addition much of what the Central Banks consider inflation is a rise in wages -- to which they are against. A 20% prime rate is exactly what we don't need right now. That would cause incredible misery and hardship for 99% of the world and favor those that have money in this economy which really only is the rich and super rich, everyone else's effective debt burden would be greatly expounded by the deflation this would cause. Works great for the bankers though, they sign you on to some debt when money is cheap (low interest rates) and then get you to pay that back after the price of money is made very expensive (high interest rates).
Uh, what?
Have you even heard of prices in the 70s? The US was a couple of clumsy rate decreases away from hyperinflation and collapse. Had Volcker not increased rates, the US would have been screwed over and Jimmy Carter's idiotic new government agencies wouldn't have helped in the slightest. As it was, he dealt with inflation and the US recovered from the recession and began to grow again. A lot of the growth was from easy credit policies, but at the very least the malinvestment of the past thirty years was cleared out and the economy was far healthier in the long run as a result. Mind, a solution like that might not work this time, it might take a more radical push (again, removing legal tender), but it would at the very least be better than bailouts, easy lending, lots of inflation, bailouts for other countries trying equally retarded strategies (Japan and the Eurozone lack the "worldwide reserve currency" status of the USA), and stagnation.
The facts of the 80s disagree with your wild claims about catastrophe from high rates.
The overall lack of solutions being posted to this board proves the general ignorance of the member of this forum on economics. That goes for all that aren't reading this.
This depression can be stopped almost overnight, this is a political problem not a failing of economics or a lack of solutions that do exist if we seek to find them.
"DAMN IT YOU GUYS! YOU AREN'T COMING TO THE CONCLUSIONS I WANT SO IMMA CLAIM YOU DIDN'T PROVIDE ANY SOLUTIONS"
derp
