I'm not a gold bug but Alan was a proponent of the gold standard. He wrote about how the gold standard created responsible spending and more equality in the world:
The world we are in now, especially in the US, is one where there is near unlimited government credit but it is, according to many, papering over deep structural problems. At some point, these chickens will come home to roost in some way or another. But it is hard to predict when.
So he was in favour of the gold standard because it prevented massive unconstrained expansion of credit and that seems sensible.
Further, sticking to the gold standard made the Great Depression worse as it reduced flexibility and options of central banks had, and made deflation worse:
I am aware of today's inequality (e.g., I read Piketty back when he was making a splash). But the critique is that Greenspan argued gold standard = less inequality and that fails on the historical record.
If we want to talk about the causes of the 'New Gilded Age' that's something else. As a general starting point I'd begin with:
Gold Standard is probably a force that acts against inequality but the forces pushing inequality today are just much stronger. Technology that creates winner take all markets and incredible leverage with few people being one.
Yea, that's his point. The gold standard neither prevents nor encourages inequality, except inasmuch as it limits policy flexibility (which, similarly, could be used to promote or limit inequality).
Policy flexibility is the only one of those that’s in theory responsive to democratic governance. Your opinion of whether that’s a good thing or not depends somewhat on which side of the inequality you’re on, I think.
The separation of wealth during the Gilded age was caused by the same thing it is caused by today: rapid industrialization. This rapid industrialization began when the US was off the gold standard during the civil war. The 1920's gilded age was fueled by fiat money, the greenback.
The great depression was triggered in part by imbalanced gold flows when we returned to gold back currencies.
” The Wall Street Crash of October 1929 precipitated a U.S. recession, but it was the gold standard that converted this into a worldwide depression. With currencies locked to gold, there was little scope to ease monetary conditions. When the U.S. economy slumped, its import demand plummeted and it exported deflation to the rest of the world. Gold-standard countries could not respond by cutting interest rates or letting their currencies depreciate to stimulate exports – their priority was to defend the peg. As a result, economic downturns spread rapidly.”
It didn’t start with gold standard. It started with the issuance of greenbacks during the Civil War. If they never issued greenbacks during the Civil War, there would not have been an issue with going back on the gold standard.
Sorry. This is quixotic revisionism. What do you think happens during a war? Both the Union and the Confederacy were printing paper money like there is no tomorrow. In the case of the Confederacy, it was literally true.
Semi-ironically France was the reason the US fell off the dollar standard after it panic hoarded gold AGAIN when the French government made one last, massive purchase of gold from the US using US dollars, paying $35/oz. A French warship arrived in New York in early August 1971 to load the gold and bring it back to France.
Reckless spending post WW2 was the main reason the US shot itself in the foot and got into this position where they couldn't reasonably pay most clients back and France saw this developing.
All in all France managed to deal massive blows to the US economy covertly TWICE within the same century.
Sorry no. France was a wreck of itself after WWI having lost an entire generation of its young men. Germany was even worse off. The US was the economic engine of the world after WWI. Despite the fact the US regulatory institutions was in its infancy. The FED at that time had no teeth. It was only after FDR became president and the continuous bank runs that the FDIC and Glass Steagall (which has been repealed) and modern banking regulations were put in effect. When the US stock market bubble popped and plunged the US into depression, it was the hard money policies such as the Smoot Hawley tariffs and Hoover’s economic hands off policies that made everything worse.
And then later in the 1930s as world gold flowed into the US (in response to the rise of the Axis) the economy began to recover here. By the end of the war most gold was in the US.
This still happens today but with instruments other than gold, right? Like foreign owned shares. Today's equivalent would be China owning all the treasury bonds.
> All in all France managed to deal massive blows to the US economy covertly TWICE within the same century.
And now it seems to be the US' turn in returning the favor. First 2007ff (caused by irresponsible actors in the financial world), then the lackluster response to Covid and Russia's invasion against Ukraine, and now we're set to look at the AI bubble collapsing, a bubble much much larger than Lehman Brothers ever was.
> The Gilded Age, which had quite high levels of inequality, occurred when the gold standard was active:
And the Gilded Age [1] ended long before the gold standard. Which makes sense since the Gilded Age is a political issue not a monetary one; how will the productivity from railroads be redistributed?
> It should also be noted that the gold standard did not bring any kind of price stability:
A comparison of 35 years against 4?
That's like bragging about how smart private credit is by showing the low volatility in it's price over the past year.
The large concern from gold bugs is that by printing money we just make the next crash even larger. But of course we just print more in the next crash so it doesn't happen. Take a look at the fed balance sheet [2]; under Kaynsian ideology you were supposed to sell that off during the boom years so you can take on debt during the busts but politicians are not disciplined enough to do that so the Gold Standard would've never let them.
---
IMO, the real argument against the Gold Standard is that the US left it is because we spent more money than we made to finance the Vietnam War. If we returned to it, then we'd just leave it again when it became inconvenient. It's not the Gold Standard that needs fixing in the country.
The Gilded Age was the 1870-1900, the gold standard was from 1870-1920s. Gold did not help stop inequality, and many progressive elements rallied against it when it was in effect:
Panics and economic downturns during the Gold Standard period were much more frequency. The term "Great Depression" used to refer to something else besides what happened in the 1930s, and the gold standard was a contributing factor to that as well:
> Take a look at the fed balance sheet [2]; under Kaynsian ideology you were supposed to sell that off during the boom years so you can take on debt during the busts but politicians are not disciplined enough to do that so the Gold Standard would've never let them.
On the Gold Standard the flexibility of emergency spending during bad years would not be possible: see 1930-1932, and then again in 1937–1938 when FDR tried to go back to balanced budgets through austerity.
The politicians that tend to talk about "hard money" and responsible spending are the GOP—but who only seem to talk about it when a Democrat is in the White House. When their guy is in then it's all tax cuts, which do not pay for themselves:
> many progressive elements rallied against it when it was in effect:
Bryan wanted a gold and silver standard, not fiat currency. There was also the Greenback-Labor Party who wanted to get off both gold and silver standard. They favored inflation because the gold and silver backed currencies were causing deflation.
You seem to be cherry picking in hopes that people do not know the history of the time.
Bryan wanted to solve the same problem that we solve today with central banking and fiat. Basically, the gold standard limited money supply and the interest of the big money interests was to gather all of the wealth. There were no taxes or carrying costs for wealth, so that’s how they won the game.
Farmers and regular people were drowning in debt while the money shortage created a deflationary cycle.
Silver is more plentiful and more volatile - Bryan wanted a fixed 16:1 ratio with gold.
The magic of fiat is that as long as you have working governance, modest inflation and plentiful credit equals prosperity.
> Bryan wanted a gold and silver standard, not fiat currency.
Yes, but what does "bimetallism" mean?
> The Cross of Gold speech was delivered by William Jennings Bryan, a former United States Representative from Nebraska, at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago on July 9, 1896. In his address, Bryan supported "free silver" (i.e. bimetallism), which he believed would bring the nation prosperity.
> Free silver was a major economic policy issue in the United States in the late 19th century. Its advocates were in favor of an expansionary monetary policy featuring the unlimited coinage of silver into money on demand, as opposed to strict adherence to the more carefully fixed money supply implicit in the gold standard.
[…]
> While all agreed that an expanded money supply would inevitably inflate prices, the issue was whether this inflation would be beneficial or not. The issue peaked from 1893 to 1896, when the economy was suffering from a severe depression characterized by falling prices (deflation), high unemployment in industrial areas, and severe distress for farmers.[1] It ranks as the 11th largest decline in U.S. stock market history.[2]
[…]
> As a result, the monetary value of silver coins was based on government fiat rather than on the commodity value of their contents, and this became especially true following silver strikes in the West, which further depressed the silver price. From that time until the early 1960s the silver content in United States dimes, quarters, half-dollars, and silver dollars was worth only a fraction of their face values.[10] Free coinage of silver would have amounted to an increase in the money supply, resulting in inflation.[3]
Hard and soft money exists on a spectrum, and it seems to be that "free silver" is a move away from hard and towards soft/fiat, and more monetary flexibility.
He also oversaw the economy for twenty years before one of the worst recessions in the world. He helped set the stage for multiple disasters with his policies, so I'd take his opinions with a grain of salt.
I don't think anyone really holds him responsible for the dotnet crash of 2000 as that was a market issue and irrational exuberance issue and not a monetary one.
And 2008 was similar. The Fed doesn't control or have any responsibility for lower lender standards or ARM mortgages.
Congress was responsible for the GSE's that bought any mortgages and wrote insurance on those mortgages, so you can't blame the FED for that.
Wallstreet are their regulators were responsible for the securitization of mortgages that went bad in 2008, not the FED.
At worst you can say they had the wrong monetary policy but that's an opinion and not something that can be said as a fact.
Can you flesh out how you feel Greenspan is responsible for 2008?
He actively campaigned against any regulation of derivatives. There is an infamous lunch that he had with Brooksley Born (who was head of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission) in the late 1990s where she attempted to regulate them. The details of the meeting are fuzzy and none of the participants will go on the record to what was said, but the gist is that he said he would fight her tooth and nail. After massive lobbying from Greenspan, as well as Lawrence Summers, congress passed legislation prohibiting her agency from regulating derivatives. She resigned shortly after.
You don't think Greenspan had a major hand in the dot com crash? "In late 1999, the Federal Reserve under Greenspan flooded the financial system with unprecedented liquidity to ward off potential deflationary impacts and cash-hoarding caused by the Y2K bug panic. The Fed expanded the money supply at an annualized rate of 22% in the fourth quarter of 1999."
As for the Great Recession, taking the Fed Funds rate from 6.5% to 1.0% and holding it there for a year was the catalyst for driving everyone into the mortgage market looking for returns. And then did not regulate subprime lending or the shadow banking market:
"As the housing market boomed, subprime mortgage originations skyrocketed from 8.2% of all mortgages in 2003 to 23.5% in 2006. The Fed possessed the authority under the Home Ownership and Equity Protection Act (HOEPA) to crack down on predatory lending and loose underwriting standards but chose not to act aggressively."
"The Fed failed to properly monitor off-balance-sheet vehicles, investment bank leverage, and complex derivatives like mortgage-backed securities (MBS) and collateralized debt obligations (CDOs). Because these instruments developed outside traditional commercial banking oversight, a highly leveraged 'shadow banking' system grew completely unchecked under the Fed's watch."
So yeah, the Fed has its fingerprints all over the scene of the crime. Lots of blame to go around though..
The chief criticism lies in the "Greenspan put"--the idea that the Fed would just never let asset prices fall, a policy which both bears his name and is noteworthy enough to have a detailed Wikipedia article on it.
Greenspan actively advocated for more use of ARM mortgages for personal home buying, while in a position to have the best access to data and analysis on the growing risk of those mortgages. Whereas mere common sense and a knowledge of economic history would argue against widespread use of ARMs for individual home purchases. When the fed chair says “we need more ARMs” to a market using ARMs to prop up a growing bubble, that is as much or more responsibility as any other single person.
Alan Greenspan acquired too much power and went out of his way to railroad regulators. It was a classic "absolute power corrupts absolutely" and his flooding the markets with dollar liquidity at every crisis completely destroyed any concepts of moral hazard, of which we are still living with the consequences to this day.
He set the stage for the financial crisis that started crumbling a year after he left the fed chair. It wasn't all his fault (politicians lost any spine and bankers any sense), but he was the conductor.
He was a believer in the idea that banks would never act against their own long term interests in order to make money quickly because that would be an existential crisis for the bank.
Shortly after he left a bank with over 150 years of history collapsed due to exactly that sort of mismanagement, triggering a crisis for the entire banking sector.
And when production for a system I built burns down the month after I leave my job, the next guy they hire was actually the culprit! Greenspan was seen as responsible for the dot-com bust as well which was solidly in the center of his tenure.
The new IT manager walks into his office. He sits down and goes through his desk and finds three envelopes with the numbers 1, 2, and 3 on them with the attached letter:
Congratulations on your new job. To help you out, I've enclosed three pieces of advice to follow when you encounter an intractable problem. Open them in order.
A short few months later there was a significant production outage. Things wouldn't work and management was getting angry. After a long day of angry meetings he went to his desk and opened the first letter. It read "Blame it on your predecessor."
The next day in the meetings he blamed it on his predecessor and told of all the things that weren't done right... routine patching left undone, documentation in disarray. Upper management grumbled but agreed to give him the time to fix it.
Two years later there was another outage. This one went on for a day or two and management was once again getting angry about things and so he went to his desk and pulled out the second letter. "Blame it on the hardware."
With that, he went in pointing out that they were years behind on keeping the hardware itself up to date. Upper management grumbled again but agreed to a budget that allowed him to update the hardware.
For a while, everything was smooth and then it hit... another outage. He went to his desk and opened the third letter. "Prepare three envelopes."
There was a stimulus check that went out around that time. I felt it insane that I was receiving a check when nobody in my life was negatively impacted, the economy didn’t seem hurt (no more then when you’re up then down at a blackjack table), it was just a rebalancing of people’s portfolios values. Turns out that started the wave of completely untargeted stimulus/aide that would come at every economic faltering. I wish we would at least try to identify who is in need during these times. It drives me crazy when I would see the lines at Gucci and LV type stores backed up every week a Covid check went out.
TLDR - Why make it harder for people to get help on the basis that some people might get help who don't deserve it?
means testing kills the usefulness of these kinds of stimuli. I completely disagree with your point here and the people buying Gucci/LV are a drop in the bucket compared to, say, Wal-Mart's yearly wage theft statistics.
There is no simple means of identifying who is in need and if people get the help who don't need it they can redistribute it if they are morally inclined or do hoarding or w/e; who cares?
There’s no need to make it difficult. All you have to do is publish sensible guardrails and force people to apply for assistance and it would shrink the public cost substantially.
I have homeowners insurance, but if my home burns down today I won’t have any reasonable assistance deposited this week. There’s a claim process and I need to have an emergency fund to get my immediate needs met.
Everyone should care. The national debt and eventually the nation will crumble based on these decisions to just print massive amounts of money with no real need.
I didn’t qualify for any stimulus after that one in 2001 so they are filtering it down and putting up some guardrails. They just need to give this some intent and pre thought. You can claim it’s too difficult when you didn’t even try to have a plan or come up with something that was actually going to good use to assist those in need.
Another way to think about it, if Covid was more severe than it was, we’d have wanted those payments to continue for twice or more longer to those in need. But if we were tapped out and had to stop them early, then those in need ultimately succumb to whatever and all the money was spent in vain.
I personally believe we shouldn’t socialize every blip. We are just perpetuating this “who cares” mentality and a welfare mentality. Why even have savings or an emergency fund, the government should step in at every turn. It’s a ridiculous stance in my view.
> All you have to do is publish sensible guardrails and force people to apply for assistance and it would shrink the public cost substantially.
On the contrary, all public experience shows the opposite. The administrative costs of actually checking if only the right people are receiving a benefit very quickly start out weighing the cost of just paying everyone - especially if you don't want to make the process very onerous for the people who need it (and thus ensure that many who are entitled will not actually be able to receive this).
With llms this should be trivial. Government agency has access to tax fillings of individuals, because... why it shouldn't. They see income, they see family situation, age of kids etc, its couple of if-this-then-that and that's it. That can cover 80-90% of the cases precisely enough to make difference.
Don't let perfect be the enemy of good, nobody expects perfect checks but at least some sanity is much better than nothing. Also, it makes it much harder to shoot down by opponents rather than blanket money hose.
The dot-com bust produced an EXTREMELY mild recession (so mild that it was often misattributed to 9/11, which occurred when it was almost over.
OTOH, there was a lot of pain iny the subsequent expansion leading up to the 2008 , but that was all the fault of fiscal (eepecially tax) policy of the Bush Administration and thei Congressional allies, not Fed monetary policy. While Greenspan clearly ideologically supported the people doing that, it wasn't him and the Fed causing the problems.
It was "mild" because they rolled the would-be losses into high-risk vehicles and strategies that eventually created the GFC, which included Fed policy to juice asset markets. The Dotcom bubble was the rolling over of the Reagan/Papa Bush-era savings and loan crisis (Greenspan was involved in that, too), and (tinfoil hats on now) a massive bond market liquidity crisis preceded the COVID pandemic flash crash and emergency liquidity injections/stimulus/PPP by a scant few months (and was quietly swept under the rug).
We deserve what we get if we don't act on the obvious pattern, at this point. We've spent half a century throwing the public under the bus just so that a few oligarchs don't have to pay out for their bad bets, and Greenspan was absolutely their man for a significant portion of that campaign in the class wars.
I think that this was relatively not known as a major risk far in advance otherwise more traders would have gotten rich. Michael Burry only started to short the market in late 2005, four months before Greenspan's term ended.
It is hard to ask Greenspan to have super natural powers of foresight beyond just about everyone else.
https://youtu.be/mqicZN7wHtU is the final bit from the Big Short where Mark Baum is to speak before the "legendary, former chairman of the Fed Alan Greenspan" at a financial conference in 2008.
It described the dotcom bubble, but I seem to recall people were applying it to the 2000s housing market too. Tldr it was not a totally uncommon opinion during either of these bubbles to say there was a bubble going on.
> It is hard to ask Greenspan to have super natural powers of foresight beyond just about everyone else.
From a person in his position the baseline is "more foresight than just about everyone else". That's why they get the big bucks.
If you build something grand on wooden legs and massive debt for the next guy to deal with, or drive into a failure mode even if that's not super obvious, it's not high praise.
I have come around to gold. Money shouldn't be dual purposes, we should apply single responsibility principal. Money should refer to some stable (albeit slightly growing by nature) account of measure.
Prices should get cheaper. That's a progress dividend. We get better at growing food every year, why shouldn't food get cheaper? Imagine a world in which prices regularly go down. You're a passive beneficiary of technological progress.
The argument that prices can't get cheaper or [bad thing will happen] was never very convincing to me. Prices already do get cheaper for large swaths of the economy that have technological progress grow faster than money supply. Cell phones are rapidly depreciating. You can wait 6m to a year and get a significant discount on the latest iPhone version. People don't stop buying iPhones, and Apple doesn't stop investing in iPhones. This is even more true w/ AI models. Investors/companies are burning billions to build tech that will only get cheaper and obsolete in years if not months.
So if you were to try to convince me that deflation would reduce investment or spending, tell me why this doesn't apply to tech products that get cheaper every year.
Does that include the price of labour? Are you okay with your salary going down? Because the historical record shows that's what happens during deflationary periods: producers of good/services see the price that they can sell things for goes down, and so they insist on their suppliers and inputs—including labour input—reduce their prices as well.
Why would it go down? The person is becoming more productive? Do employees at Apple salaries go down because the iPhone they're working on is worth less every year?
Again, tie it to things that decrease in price over time.
> Imagine a world in which prices regularly go down
That world results in a lot of people individually deciding "why buy now, when I can buy for less later" and sitting on their money.
That in aggregate makes the economy much worse.
You're up against human nature here. Money may be an arbitrary numerical denomination of value, but people's behavior around it and how that affects the economy at large need to be accounted for. Having prices slowly creep upwards over time (low inflation) tends to result in more, better things sooner.
Tech product price dynamics benefit from a bunch of things that food doesn’t: they’re optional purchases, they’re early stage developments which have more low hanging fruit, and purchase price can be subsidized with later plays (subscriptions, data sales, network effects, freemium to enterprise pipeline).
Also - I think if you look at the data you’ll find periods off the gold standard where food prices grew more slowly than inflation and even wages, ie food becomes cheaper. 80s and 90s for example.
If prices get cheaper all the time, there would be no way for anyone to ever borrow money. Tech products like phones used to get cheaper because 1) they start out at a wild markup; 2) they have intense competition by rivals to build the latest and greatest; 3) the ability to make things faster/smaller continued to increase. Those factors are non-existent for most industries, and they are reducing in effect for tech products over time.
>"We get better at growing food every year, why shouldn't food get cheaper? Imagine a world in which prices regularly go down."
Because a lot of people earn their living by producing or selling food. Your other necessities don't become more affordable just because food prices go down, but if that's your livelihood it becomes at risk. Food was incredibly cheap during the great depression. There's an amazing quote from the PBS documentary series on it; "A sack of flour cost a nickel, but where were you gonna get a nickel?". Steady, controlled inflation via fiat is the only way to keep a capitalistic economy functioning, because you can't micromanage or control the price of everything, and people need money to live. The real issue is stagnation of wage growth while assets explode. It's the transfer of real wealth from earners to owners that has put us in the current position, not absolute prices.
39 trillion in debt with no Congressional stomach for...
- spending cuts
- stopping fraud
- figuring out how the net worth of people in Congress increases from hundreds of thousands of dollars to 10s or 100s of millions of dollars
- addressing wasteful and ineffective programs
Given those issues, the only solution will be inflation. The circling the drain moment will hit with the associated welfare programs get a direct staple to inflation itself, so we will spend more to combat inflation, causing more inflation faster.
Good to know that this will be an evergreen argument despite an extremely well-supported project to do just that taking place in the last two years with nothing to show for itself other than hundreds of thousands of deaths.
>> stopping fraud / - addressing wasteful and ineffective programs
> Good to know that this will be an evergreen argument despite an extremely well-supported project to do just that taking place in the last two years with nothing to show for itself other than hundreds of thousands of deaths.
Not to mention the most prominent example of this this year sidestepped the Congressional stomach completely. An order of magnitude larger budget than all of the NSF grants combined spent on the war with Iran over 100 days.
Both wasteful and ineffective: it failed to achieve any of its goals and had a massive negative impact on the US economy that will continue for some time.
Does it count as fraud, though, or just gross negligence when experts had already warned that this would be the exact outcome ahead of time but were ignored?
If you gave a snap quiz to all Trump voters asking whether the cost of the Iran War or the DOGE cuts were greater, I wonder how many would get the right answer.
> despite an extremely well-supported project to do just that
a weird extremely small executive branch task force with pretty much zero power is not what i would call a well supported project in the context of the trying to reduce spending in the american government.
Congress controls the purse, doge had nothing to do with congress.
Tell it to the hundreds of thousands of dead people that doge had zero power. It didn't seem to matter that their aid was congressionally allocated, so sorry if I'm skeptical that doge was ineffective because of an abundance of restraint and respect for separation of powers.
And can mean many things. On the right, it often means Somali daycares, on the left it means the underfunding of the IRS so that it doesn't do audits of rich people.
I find this to be mostly a distraction:
"- figuring out how the net worth of people in Congress increases from hundreds of thousands of dollars to 10s or 100s of millions of dollars"
We should ban stock trading by members of the government, the Ro Khanna bill, but while it can be a source of corruption, it isn't a major source of inequality in the US.
This is unclear, can you be more specific as it has different answers based on one's partisan leanings:
"- addressing wasteful and ineffective programs"
I think a lot of the distortion of US policy towards the rich is a result of Citizens United and similar unrestrained lobbying funds.
“Raising taxes” is a misnomer - “restoring taxes to the level they were when we were deciding how to allocate tax revenue” is more accurate. There’s plenty of other causes of the deficit, but “Congress deciding not to take money from wealthy people and corporations to fund the services they’d promised to the rest of us” is the core. We don’t have a budget deficit, we have a tax revenue deficit.
> Inflation numbers aren’t even believable and It’s already not fun
For inflation to have an impact on the US debt, it has to be approaching the level at which the US debt is increasing. In the last year, the US debt increased by 7.6%, much higher than inflation.
From what I observe from fraud and corruption witch-hunts, they are nothing more than that. The real fraud is that government that is supposed to serve the people who elected it serves everyone else first.
There is nothing left (edit: discretionary) to cut, and there is no material fraud. Taxes must go up. Only the top 40% of Americans have any income or wealth to tax (bottom 60% of Americans have no federal tax liability). Or, as you mention, we monetize the debt, print dollars, and burn up the currency value.
Correction accepted. Eight failed audits. Would love to see the will to fix this specific item, but am not confident it exists. We spent hundreds of billions on war with Iran before we forgave student loan debt and instituted Medicare for All, for example. The evidence is clear these are active choices we can make. We actively choose the bad financial policy choices through governance outcomes.
The only branch of government I have faith in at the moment is the bond market.
> ...it prevented massive unconstrained expansion of credit and that seems sensible.
At the height of the Great Depression (1936), some economists proposed The Chicago Plan to separate the provision of credit from the money supply by eliminating fractional reserve banking, giving better control of the increases and contractions of credit, the elimination of bank runs, and a dramatic reduction in debt. There was a recent (2012) paper from the IMF [1] that seemed to find this actually is pretty sensible, although I do not claim to be smart enough to understand all of the implications.
Tying the ability to increase the money supply to a metal we have to dig out of the ground is ridiculous.
>near unlimited government credit
Really? How do we get some? And, beyond that, what do YOU think the limits should be on increasing the money supply by a sovereign nation?
A nation becomes wealthy by producing things to sell. Nothing else matters, including debt. But, we live in a world where people want to be rich, but also don't want to use resources, or build, or manufacture things, or run an empire. It's contradictory, and we are starting to see the effects.
Gold based money, or eras of coinage, historically have been times of war and slavery. The debt system we are in now is far better in a lot of ways. The outcome of what happens depends on the political will deciding where the credit flows.
It is well know there weren't deep structural problems at the time of (and caused by) the gold standard...
I don't understand why people keep banging about the theoretical advantaged of a gold standard whan it was the default monetary system for centuries and we have firsthand evidence of the problems it causes (and certainly not more equality in the world!). It has been tried by the whole Earth during several generations.
If you think, like Greenspan and others, that there ought to be a mechanism to force some monetary restraint on governments, try to think of a new mechanism, because the "old way" wasn't better. We know it. Move on.
Responsibility is not something that the current market players want to see, whether it be through the gold standard, reasonable interest rates, or any other mechanism. They'll argue that the next big thing is simply too expensive for that sort of constraint.
Greenspan was also the subject in the weird comics "h4x0r economist"/"haxor economist", which thankfully still live on since its early internet days https://www.rdwarf.com/users/kioh/ (NSFW language)
IIRC it was Greenspan that didn’t mean to, but did disclose the use of gold swaps, so even if there is all the gold that is claimed to be in Fort Knox, the question of who owns the gold is unanswered.
When I was in high school in the 90s, and just discovering the world of money and finance, I stumbled on Alan Greenspan and instantly liked some of his thinking about it. I tried my best to learn from everything he did, read every news article I could find, followed rates, the economics of money, the impact on markets, and more. I learned more about government politics and money and influence from that experience than I have since! I'll admit that my mindset about the Fed and money in general is very much due to what I learned in those impressionable years.
Mostly I just know Alan Greenspan for being a disciple of Ayn Rand back in the 1950s/60s. Though the Objectivists didn't like his work at the federal reserve. In 2008 he admits to being shocked that banks weren't rationally selfish.
The guy who called the Federal Reserve the "penny in the fuse box" of the economy was not an "Ayn Rand disciple" by the time he took the chairmanship. Power as chair of the Council of Economic Advisers under Ford really transformed him and I think severed the tenuous hold he had on her principles.
The libertarian community really thought they had their fox in the hen house when he was put in charge of regulation, and he did a fair bit of deregulation, but not nearly to the extent that they wanted. In the end it was enough to trigger a major financial crisis, but not enough to completely collapse the world economy and return to the feudalism they wanted.
Interesting bit of trivia, Greenspan was in Ayn Rand's inner circle and read her drafts of Atlas Shrugged as it was being written, and they were close friends until her death.
I'm probably a fair bit younger. I came to know the phrase, then (of) him, through the flash animation of the Happatai/Yatta song on Albino Black Sheep in the early 2000s (and these days on youtube if you search 'irrational exuberance yatta'; mildly nsfw in a few spots). Never bothered to dig into its meaning, though.
Highly recommend the extremely good multipart documentary All Watched Over By Machines Of Loving Grace by Adam Curtis for a fun and wide ranging if slightly silly look at the nexus of Greenspan, Ayn Rand, Silicon Valley, computer technology etc
Revisionist history will tell it differently, but I remember that from the mid 1990s until about 2000 when the economy was booming yet prices weren't rising, Greenspan publicly indicated that he wasn't sure exactly why that was. Or at least that the information economy had different performance characteristics than the industrial economy, since production wasn't limited by supply but by worker productivity multipliers.
Why did the cost of living decrease in the 90s but not today? What was different then vs now? Well, after the Dot Bomb and 9/11, the US hasn't followed macroeconomic principles (the main principle being to raise interest rates during increased production to prevent inflation), examine the flip after 2000:
Note that policy had a greater effect on US economic decline than who the Fed chair was. Specifically, the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act (GLBA) known as the Financial Services Modernization Act of 1999 (which reversed the Glass–Steagall Act of 1933 and removed barriers in the market among banking companies, securities companies, and insurance companies) allowed investors to gamble with our savings again like before the Great Depression:
The Housing Bubble popped less than a decade later in 2008.
The Telecommunications Act of 1996 had deregulated the information economy, cementing the duopolies we see today, although the fallout from that arguably wasn't felt until after the arrival of fast mobile internet that coincided with the 2008 financial crisis, which contributed to the high communications prices we pay today vs the rest of the world (imposing a kind of privatized tax on the information economy):
What I saw then was the last hurrah of US colonialism, which patterned itself off of England but used proxy wars instead of direct colonization. Loosely, keeping Asia down supported western antisocialist goals while simultaneously bolstering capitalist economies. In other words, buying shoes for $5 and selling them for $100 (times everything) allowed the US to transition from blue collar to white collar work.
That resulted in the US closing 100,000 factories under the GW Bush administration of the 2000s. And also outsourcing to China and India, the reduction of pure R&D to almost nothing, massive investment in McMansions and SUVs instead of something like renewable energy, and of course diverting perhaps $3 trillion or more to forever wars in the Middle East to prop up the declining industrial economy which depends on fossil fuels.
That's all changing now as China's buying power is passing that of the US:
They don't want to make our stuff for pennies on the dollar anymore, and the US can't carry its own weight without massive reeducation and retooling.
But since the US wasted $40 trillion on its national debt instead of investing in the 21st century economy we thought we are going to get in the 90s, we now see prices increasing in parity with wages. In other words, nearly all excess labor productivity goes towards paying the debt ran up by the previous generation. Thomas Jefferson warned against this:
The young are paying the elderly's retirement while being told to eat less avocado toast.
The reason I'm writing this is that the powers that be will try to tell you that we need to cut government spending and taxes to outrun our economic decline. But if you understand everything I just wrote, then you'll see that the damage of 40 years of trickle-down economics and austerity has already been done.
The way out of this is self-evidently to try new approaches favored by the youth who are doing the work but not seeing the benefits like previous generations did. We're living in a second Gilded Age dominated by wage slavery and high wealth inequality:
The low-hanging fruit is getting money out of politics (reversing the Citizens United decision), closing the revolving door between the government and lobbyists, antitrust enforcement, and other popular goals.
But real progress looks like FDR-style New Deal taxation on the ultra-wealthy to pay down the public debt, forgiveness of private debts incurred by artificially inflated costs (jubilee) and public funding of the commons (education, healthcare, the energy and communications grids, anything that results in natural monopolies).
Greenspan wouldn't have liked what I just wrote at the end there. But he would have supported the ending of intergenerational debt IMHO. That's why I think it makes a good target for today's youth, when they need a litmus test for deciding whether voting for a proposed policy is in their best interest.
I'm not a gold bug but Alan was a proponent of the gold standard. He wrote about how the gold standard created responsible spending and more equality in the world:
https://ritholtz.com/2008/11/gold-and-economic-freedom-by-al...
The world we are in now, especially in the US, is one where there is near unlimited government credit but it is, according to many, papering over deep structural problems. At some point, these chickens will come home to roost in some way or another. But it is hard to predict when.
So he was in favour of the gold standard because it prevented massive unconstrained expansion of credit and that seems sensible.
> He wrote about how the gold standard created responsible spending and more equality in the world:
The Gilded Age, which had quite high levels of inequality, occurred when the gold standard was active:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gilded_Age
It should also be noted that the gold standard did not bring any kind of price stability:
* https://archive.is/https://www.theatlantic.com/business/arch...
Further, sticking to the gold standard made the Great Depression worse as it reduced flexibility and options of central banks had, and made deflation worse:
* https://www.nber.org/papers/w3488
The sooner countries left the gold standard the sooner they started recovering from the Great Depression:
* https://www.nber.org/papers/w27586
> The Gilded Age, which had quite high levels of inequality, occurred when the gold standard was active
I've got some news for you about modern levels of inequality.
I am aware of today's inequality (e.g., I read Piketty back when he was making a splash). But the critique is that Greenspan argued gold standard = less inequality and that fails on the historical record.
If we want to talk about the causes of the 'New Gilded Age' that's something else. As a general starting point I'd begin with:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friedman_doctrine
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reaganomics
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thatcherism
Gold Standard is probably a force that acts against inequality but the forces pushing inequality today are just much stronger. Technology that creates winner take all markets and incredible leverage with few people being one.
Yea, that's his point. The gold standard neither prevents nor encourages inequality, except inasmuch as it limits policy flexibility (which, similarly, could be used to promote or limit inequality).
Policy flexibility is the only one of those that’s in theory responsive to democratic governance. Your opinion of whether that’s a good thing or not depends somewhat on which side of the inequality you’re on, I think.
Don’t those two data points suggest inequality is orthogonal to the gold standard?
The separation of wealth during the Gilded age was caused by the same thing it is caused by today: rapid industrialization. This rapid industrialization began when the US was off the gold standard during the civil war. The 1920's gilded age was fueled by fiat money, the greenback.
The great depression was triggered in part by imbalanced gold flows when we returned to gold back currencies.
https://explaininghistory.org/2025/06/12/golden-fetters-the-...
We are essentially replaying the greenback inflation of the 1860's and have been doing it since 1971.
From your linked article.
” The Wall Street Crash of October 1929 precipitated a U.S. recession, but it was the gold standard that converted this into a worldwide depression. With currencies locked to gold, there was little scope to ease monetary conditions. When the U.S. economy slumped, its import demand plummeted and it exported deflation to the rest of the world. Gold-standard countries could not respond by cutting interest rates or letting their currencies depreciate to stimulate exports – their priority was to defend the peg. As a result, economic downturns spread rapidly.”
It didn’t start with gold standard. It started with the issuance of greenbacks during the Civil War. If they never issued greenbacks during the Civil War, there would not have been an issue with going back on the gold standard.
Sorry. This is quixotic revisionism. What do you think happens during a war? Both the Union and the Confederacy were printing paper money like there is no tomorrow. In the case of the Confederacy, it was literally true.
> The separation of wealth during the Gilded age was caused by the same thing it is caused by today: rapid industrialization.
What "rapid industrialization" is happening today?
Have you lived through the late 90s big tech boom or the current AI boom?
> Have you lived through the late 90s big tech boom or the current AI boom?
Inequality (at least in the US) started growing in the 1980s, after Reagan got elected. For causes I'd start with these:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friedman_doctrine
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reaganomics
The Great Depression was caused by France panic hoarding gold https://www.nber.org/papers/w16350
Semi-ironically France was the reason the US fell off the dollar standard after it panic hoarded gold AGAIN when the French government made one last, massive purchase of gold from the US using US dollars, paying $35/oz. A French warship arrived in New York in early August 1971 to load the gold and bring it back to France.
Reckless spending post WW2 was the main reason the US shot itself in the foot and got into this position where they couldn't reasonably pay most clients back and France saw this developing.
All in all France managed to deal massive blows to the US economy covertly TWICE within the same century.
https://scholarship.law.columbia.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?art...
Sorry no. France was a wreck of itself after WWI having lost an entire generation of its young men. Germany was even worse off. The US was the economic engine of the world after WWI. Despite the fact the US regulatory institutions was in its infancy. The FED at that time had no teeth. It was only after FDR became president and the continuous bank runs that the FDIC and Glass Steagall (which has been repealed) and modern banking regulations were put in effect. When the US stock market bubble popped and plunged the US into depression, it was the hard money policies such as the Smoot Hawley tariffs and Hoover’s economic hands off policies that made everything worse.
And then later in the 1930s as world gold flowed into the US (in response to the rise of the Axis) the economy began to recover here. By the end of the war most gold was in the US.
This still happens today but with instruments other than gold, right? Like foreign owned shares. Today's equivalent would be China owning all the treasury bonds.
China owns about 7% of us treasury securities and they stopped buying them I think around 2015L: https://ticdata.treasury.gov/resource-center/data-chart-cent...
> All in all France managed to deal massive blows to the US economy covertly TWICE within the same century.
And now it seems to be the US' turn in returning the favor. First 2007ff (caused by irresponsible actors in the financial world), then the lackluster response to Covid and Russia's invasion against Ukraine, and now we're set to look at the AI bubble collapsing, a bubble much much larger than Lehman Brothers ever was.
Eh, aren't most of those points non-sequiturs?
> The Gilded Age, which had quite high levels of inequality, occurred when the gold standard was active:
And the Gilded Age [1] ended long before the gold standard. Which makes sense since the Gilded Age is a political issue not a monetary one; how will the productivity from railroads be redistributed?
> It should also be noted that the gold standard did not bring any kind of price stability:
A comparison of 35 years against 4?
That's like bragging about how smart private credit is by showing the low volatility in it's price over the past year.
The large concern from gold bugs is that by printing money we just make the next crash even larger. But of course we just print more in the next crash so it doesn't happen. Take a look at the fed balance sheet [2]; under Kaynsian ideology you were supposed to sell that off during the boom years so you can take on debt during the busts but politicians are not disciplined enough to do that so the Gold Standard would've never let them.
---
IMO, the real argument against the Gold Standard is that the US left it is because we spent more money than we made to finance the Vietnam War. If we returned to it, then we'd just leave it again when it became inconvenient. It's not the Gold Standard that needs fixing in the country.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Progressive_Era
[2]: https://www.federalreserve.gov/monetarypolicy/bst_recenttren...
The Gilded Age was the 1870-1900, the gold standard was from 1870-1920s. Gold did not help stop inequality, and many progressive elements rallied against it when it was in effect:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cross_of_Gold_speech
> A comparison of 35 years against 4?
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Moderation
Panics and economic downturns during the Gold Standard period were much more frequency. The term "Great Depression" used to refer to something else besides what happened in the 1930s, and the gold standard was a contributing factor to that as well:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_Depression
> Take a look at the fed balance sheet [2]; under Kaynsian ideology you were supposed to sell that off during the boom years so you can take on debt during the busts but politicians are not disciplined enough to do that so the Gold Standard would've never let them.
On the Gold Standard the flexibility of emergency spending during bad years would not be possible: see 1930-1932, and then again in 1937–1938 when FDR tried to go back to balanced budgets through austerity.
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recession_of_1937–1938
The politicians that tend to talk about "hard money" and responsible spending are the GOP—but who only seem to talk about it when a Democrat is in the White House. When their guy is in then it's all tax cuts, which do not pay for themselves:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kansas_experiment
and spending (see >$1T Pentagon budget(s)). They're mostly trying to roll back the New Deal (and later Great Society) and cut social programs:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starve_the_beast
> the gold standard was from 1870-1920s.
The U.S. officially left the gold standard on August 15, 1971.
https://blog.swissamerica.com/glossary/gold-standard/
> many progressive elements rallied against it when it was in effect:
Bryan wanted a gold and silver standard, not fiat currency. There was also the Greenback-Labor Party who wanted to get off both gold and silver standard. They favored inflation because the gold and silver backed currencies were causing deflation.
You seem to be cherry picking in hopes that people do not know the history of the time.
Bryan wanted to solve the same problem that we solve today with central banking and fiat. Basically, the gold standard limited money supply and the interest of the big money interests was to gather all of the wealth. There were no taxes or carrying costs for wealth, so that’s how they won the game.
Farmers and regular people were drowning in debt while the money shortage created a deflationary cycle.
Silver is more plentiful and more volatile - Bryan wanted a fixed 16:1 ratio with gold.
The magic of fiat is that as long as you have working governance, modest inflation and plentiful credit equals prosperity.
> Bryan wanted a gold and silver standard, not fiat currency.
Yes, but what does "bimetallism" mean?
> The Cross of Gold speech was delivered by William Jennings Bryan, a former United States Representative from Nebraska, at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago on July 9, 1896. In his address, Bryan supported "free silver" (i.e. bimetallism), which he believed would bring the nation prosperity.
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cross_of_Gold_speech
> Free silver was a major economic policy issue in the United States in the late 19th century. Its advocates were in favor of an expansionary monetary policy featuring the unlimited coinage of silver into money on demand, as opposed to strict adherence to the more carefully fixed money supply implicit in the gold standard.
[…]
> While all agreed that an expanded money supply would inevitably inflate prices, the issue was whether this inflation would be beneficial or not. The issue peaked from 1893 to 1896, when the economy was suffering from a severe depression characterized by falling prices (deflation), high unemployment in industrial areas, and severe distress for farmers.[1] It ranks as the 11th largest decline in U.S. stock market history.[2]
[…]
> As a result, the monetary value of silver coins was based on government fiat rather than on the commodity value of their contents, and this became especially true following silver strikes in the West, which further depressed the silver price. From that time until the early 1960s the silver content in United States dimes, quarters, half-dollars, and silver dollars was worth only a fraction of their face values.[10] Free coinage of silver would have amounted to an increase in the money supply, resulting in inflation.[3]
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_silver
Hard and soft money exists on a spectrum, and it seems to be that "free silver" is a move away from hard and towards soft/fiat, and more monetary flexibility.
He also oversaw the economy for twenty years before one of the worst recessions in the world. He helped set the stage for multiple disasters with his policies, so I'd take his opinions with a grain of salt.
By the same standard shouldn’t he also get credit for those 20 years of prosperity?
Really?
I don't think anyone really holds him responsible for the dotnet crash of 2000 as that was a market issue and irrational exuberance issue and not a monetary one.
And 2008 was similar. The Fed doesn't control or have any responsibility for lower lender standards or ARM mortgages.
Congress was responsible for the GSE's that bought any mortgages and wrote insurance on those mortgages, so you can't blame the FED for that.
Wallstreet are their regulators were responsible for the securitization of mortgages that went bad in 2008, not the FED.
At worst you can say they had the wrong monetary policy but that's an opinion and not something that can be said as a fact.
Can you flesh out how you feel Greenspan is responsible for 2008?
He actively campaigned against any regulation of derivatives. There is an infamous lunch that he had with Brooksley Born (who was head of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission) in the late 1990s where she attempted to regulate them. The details of the meeting are fuzzy and none of the participants will go on the record to what was said, but the gist is that he said he would fight her tooth and nail. After massive lobbying from Greenspan, as well as Lawrence Summers, congress passed legislation prohibiting her agency from regulating derivatives. She resigned shortly after.
You don't think Greenspan had a major hand in the dot com crash? "In late 1999, the Federal Reserve under Greenspan flooded the financial system with unprecedented liquidity to ward off potential deflationary impacts and cash-hoarding caused by the Y2K bug panic. The Fed expanded the money supply at an annualized rate of 22% in the fourth quarter of 1999."
As for the Great Recession, taking the Fed Funds rate from 6.5% to 1.0% and holding it there for a year was the catalyst for driving everyone into the mortgage market looking for returns. And then did not regulate subprime lending or the shadow banking market:
"As the housing market boomed, subprime mortgage originations skyrocketed from 8.2% of all mortgages in 2003 to 23.5% in 2006. The Fed possessed the authority under the Home Ownership and Equity Protection Act (HOEPA) to crack down on predatory lending and loose underwriting standards but chose not to act aggressively."
"The Fed failed to properly monitor off-balance-sheet vehicles, investment bank leverage, and complex derivatives like mortgage-backed securities (MBS) and collateralized debt obligations (CDOs). Because these instruments developed outside traditional commercial banking oversight, a highly leveraged 'shadow banking' system grew completely unchecked under the Fed's watch."
So yeah, the Fed has its fingerprints all over the scene of the crime. Lots of blame to go around though..
> Can you flesh out how you feel Greenspan is responsible for 2008?
Greenspan felt Greenspan was responsible for 2008.
https://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/24/business/economy/24panel....
The chief criticism lies in the "Greenspan put"--the idea that the Fed would just never let asset prices fall, a policy which both bears his name and is noteworthy enough to have a detailed Wikipedia article on it.
There was a dot net crash too??
Greenspan actively advocated for more use of ARM mortgages for personal home buying, while in a position to have the best access to data and analysis on the growing risk of those mortgages. Whereas mere common sense and a knowledge of economic history would argue against widespread use of ARMs for individual home purchases. When the fed chair says “we need more ARMs” to a market using ARMs to prop up a growing bubble, that is as much or more responsibility as any other single person.
It was generally 20 years of growth and the 2008 banking crisis actually happened after he left.
Alan Greenspan acquired too much power and went out of his way to railroad regulators. It was a classic "absolute power corrupts absolutely" and his flooding the markets with dollar liquidity at every crisis completely destroyed any concepts of moral hazard, of which we are still living with the consequences to this day.
He set the stage for the financial crisis that started crumbling a year after he left the fed chair. It wasn't all his fault (politicians lost any spine and bankers any sense), but he was the conductor.
He was a believer in the idea that banks would never act against their own long term interests in order to make money quickly because that would be an existential crisis for the bank.
Shortly after he left a bank with over 150 years of history collapsed due to exactly that sort of mismanagement, triggering a crisis for the entire banking sector.
And when production for a system I built burns down the month after I leave my job, the next guy they hire was actually the culprit! Greenspan was seen as responsible for the dot-com bust as well which was solidly in the center of his tenure.
The new IT manager walks into his office. He sits down and goes through his desk and finds three envelopes with the numbers 1, 2, and 3 on them with the attached letter:
A short few months later there was a significant production outage. Things wouldn't work and management was getting angry. After a long day of angry meetings he went to his desk and opened the first letter. It read "Blame it on your predecessor."The next day in the meetings he blamed it on his predecessor and told of all the things that weren't done right... routine patching left undone, documentation in disarray. Upper management grumbled but agreed to give him the time to fix it.
Two years later there was another outage. This one went on for a day or two and management was once again getting angry about things and so he went to his desk and pulled out the second letter. "Blame it on the hardware."
With that, he went in pointing out that they were years behind on keeping the hardware itself up to date. Upper management grumbled again but agreed to a budget that allowed him to update the hardware.
For a while, everything was smooth and then it hit... another outage. He went to his desk and opened the third letter. "Prepare three envelopes."
There was a stimulus check that went out around that time. I felt it insane that I was receiving a check when nobody in my life was negatively impacted, the economy didn’t seem hurt (no more then when you’re up then down at a blackjack table), it was just a rebalancing of people’s portfolios values. Turns out that started the wave of completely untargeted stimulus/aide that would come at every economic faltering. I wish we would at least try to identify who is in need during these times. It drives me crazy when I would see the lines at Gucci and LV type stores backed up every week a Covid check went out.
TLDR - Why make it harder for people to get help on the basis that some people might get help who don't deserve it?
means testing kills the usefulness of these kinds of stimuli. I completely disagree with your point here and the people buying Gucci/LV are a drop in the bucket compared to, say, Wal-Mart's yearly wage theft statistics.
There is no simple means of identifying who is in need and if people get the help who don't need it they can redistribute it if they are morally inclined or do hoarding or w/e; who cares?
There’s no need to make it difficult. All you have to do is publish sensible guardrails and force people to apply for assistance and it would shrink the public cost substantially.
I have homeowners insurance, but if my home burns down today I won’t have any reasonable assistance deposited this week. There’s a claim process and I need to have an emergency fund to get my immediate needs met.
Everyone should care. The national debt and eventually the nation will crumble based on these decisions to just print massive amounts of money with no real need.
I didn’t qualify for any stimulus after that one in 2001 so they are filtering it down and putting up some guardrails. They just need to give this some intent and pre thought. You can claim it’s too difficult when you didn’t even try to have a plan or come up with something that was actually going to good use to assist those in need.
Another way to think about it, if Covid was more severe than it was, we’d have wanted those payments to continue for twice or more longer to those in need. But if we were tapped out and had to stop them early, then those in need ultimately succumb to whatever and all the money was spent in vain.
I personally believe we shouldn’t socialize every blip. We are just perpetuating this “who cares” mentality and a welfare mentality. Why even have savings or an emergency fund, the government should step in at every turn. It’s a ridiculous stance in my view.
> All you have to do is publish sensible guardrails and force people to apply for assistance and it would shrink the public cost substantially.
On the contrary, all public experience shows the opposite. The administrative costs of actually checking if only the right people are receiving a benefit very quickly start out weighing the cost of just paying everyone - especially if you don't want to make the process very onerous for the people who need it (and thus ensure that many who are entitled will not actually be able to receive this).
With llms this should be trivial. Government agency has access to tax fillings of individuals, because... why it shouldn't. They see income, they see family situation, age of kids etc, its couple of if-this-then-that and that's it. That can cover 80-90% of the cases precisely enough to make difference.
Don't let perfect be the enemy of good, nobody expects perfect checks but at least some sanity is much better than nothing. Also, it makes it much harder to shoot down by opponents rather than blanket money hose.
Imagine you're a middle class white picket fence guy, and your bank balance is a bit low. You apply for assistance.
Now imagine you're homeless. You don't apply for assistance.
Because you can overheat the economy and cause more damage than good.
We "printed" a lot of money to stop the economy from seizing - the opposite problem - but kept going past what everyone was calling a "soft landing":
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/M2SL
Inflation hit pretty bad as a result:
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/FPCPITOTLZGUSA
The dot-com bust produced an EXTREMELY mild recession (so mild that it was often misattributed to 9/11, which occurred when it was almost over.
OTOH, there was a lot of pain iny the subsequent expansion leading up to the 2008 , but that was all the fault of fiscal (eepecially tax) policy of the Bush Administration and thei Congressional allies, not Fed monetary policy. While Greenspan clearly ideologically supported the people doing that, it wasn't him and the Fed causing the problems.
It was "mild" because they rolled the would-be losses into high-risk vehicles and strategies that eventually created the GFC, which included Fed policy to juice asset markets. The Dotcom bubble was the rolling over of the Reagan/Papa Bush-era savings and loan crisis (Greenspan was involved in that, too), and (tinfoil hats on now) a massive bond market liquidity crisis preceded the COVID pandemic flash crash and emergency liquidity injections/stimulus/PPP by a scant few months (and was quietly swept under the rug).
We deserve what we get if we don't act on the obvious pattern, at this point. We've spent half a century throwing the public under the bus just so that a few oligarchs don't have to pay out for their bad bets, and Greenspan was absolutely their man for a significant portion of that campaign in the class wars.
I think that this was relatively not known as a major risk far in advance otherwise more traders would have gotten rich. Michael Burry only started to short the market in late 2005, four months before Greenspan's term ended.
It is hard to ask Greenspan to have super natural powers of foresight beyond just about everyone else.
https://youtu.be/mqicZN7wHtU is the final bit from the Big Short where Mark Baum is to speak before the "legendary, former chairman of the Fed Alan Greenspan" at a financial conference in 2008.
This phrase was very popular for a good many years, popularized by Greenspan iirc: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irrational_exuberance
It described the dotcom bubble, but I seem to recall people were applying it to the 2000s housing market too. Tldr it was not a totally uncommon opinion during either of these bubbles to say there was a bubble going on.
> It is hard to ask Greenspan to have super natural powers of foresight beyond just about everyone else.
From a person in his position the baseline is "more foresight than just about everyone else". That's why they get the big bucks.
If you build something grand on wooden legs and massive debt for the next guy to deal with, or drive into a failure mode even if that's not super obvious, it's not high praise.
hmm, an argument against expertise is not something i expect to see often on hackernews :)
I have come around to gold. Money shouldn't be dual purposes, we should apply single responsibility principal. Money should refer to some stable (albeit slightly growing by nature) account of measure.
Prices should get cheaper. That's a progress dividend. We get better at growing food every year, why shouldn't food get cheaper? Imagine a world in which prices regularly go down. You're a passive beneficiary of technological progress.
The argument that prices can't get cheaper or [bad thing will happen] was never very convincing to me. Prices already do get cheaper for large swaths of the economy that have technological progress grow faster than money supply. Cell phones are rapidly depreciating. You can wait 6m to a year and get a significant discount on the latest iPhone version. People don't stop buying iPhones, and Apple doesn't stop investing in iPhones. This is even more true w/ AI models. Investors/companies are burning billions to build tech that will only get cheaper and obsolete in years if not months.
So if you were to try to convince me that deflation would reduce investment or spending, tell me why this doesn't apply to tech products that get cheaper every year.
> Prices should get cheaper.
Does that include the price of labour? Are you okay with your salary going down? Because the historical record shows that's what happens during deflationary periods: producers of good/services see the price that they can sell things for goes down, and so they insist on their suppliers and inputs—including labour input—reduce their prices as well.
Why would it go down? The person is becoming more productive? Do employees at Apple salaries go down because the iPhone they're working on is worth less every year?
Again, tie it to things that decrease in price over time.
> Imagine a world in which prices regularly go down
That world results in a lot of people individually deciding "why buy now, when I can buy for less later" and sitting on their money.
That in aggregate makes the economy much worse.
You're up against human nature here. Money may be an arbitrary numerical denomination of value, but people's behavior around it and how that affects the economy at large need to be accounted for. Having prices slowly creep upwards over time (low inflation) tends to result in more, better things sooner.
Keep reading the comment.
Why do people buy iPhones today knowing that they can get a significant discount in 6-12m for that same iPhone
Tech product price dynamics benefit from a bunch of things that food doesn’t: they’re optional purchases, they’re early stage developments which have more low hanging fruit, and purchase price can be subsidized with later plays (subscriptions, data sales, network effects, freemium to enterprise pipeline).
Also - I think if you look at the data you’ll find periods off the gold standard where food prices grew more slowly than inflation and even wages, ie food becomes cheaper. 80s and 90s for example.
> We get better at growing food every year, why shouldn't food get cheaper?
It has gotten cheaper, as a percentage of people's income and spending.
I suggest a bread standard. It's more useful than gold, and it worked in Brazil.
If prices get cheaper all the time, there would be no way for anyone to ever borrow money. Tech products like phones used to get cheaper because 1) they start out at a wild markup; 2) they have intense competition by rivals to build the latest and greatest; 3) the ability to make things faster/smaller continued to increase. Those factors are non-existent for most industries, and they are reducing in effect for tech products over time.
>"We get better at growing food every year, why shouldn't food get cheaper? Imagine a world in which prices regularly go down."
Because a lot of people earn their living by producing or selling food. Your other necessities don't become more affordable just because food prices go down, but if that's your livelihood it becomes at risk. Food was incredibly cheap during the great depression. There's an amazing quote from the PBS documentary series on it; "A sack of flour cost a nickel, but where were you gonna get a nickel?". Steady, controlled inflation via fiat is the only way to keep a capitalistic economy functioning, because you can't micromanage or control the price of everything, and people need money to live. The real issue is stagnation of wage growth while assets explode. It's the transfer of real wealth from earners to owners that has put us in the current position, not absolute prices.
39 trillion in debt with no Congressional stomach for...
- spending cuts
- stopping fraud
- figuring out how the net worth of people in Congress increases from hundreds of thousands of dollars to 10s or 100s of millions of dollars
- addressing wasteful and ineffective programs
Given those issues, the only solution will be inflation. The circling the drain moment will hit with the associated welfare programs get a direct staple to inflation itself, so we will spend more to combat inflation, causing more inflation faster.
It's not going to be fun.
> - stopping fraud / - addressing wasteful and ineffective programs
Good to know that this will be an evergreen argument despite an extremely well-supported project to do just that taking place in the last two years with nothing to show for itself other than hundreds of thousands of deaths.
>> stopping fraud / - addressing wasteful and ineffective programs
> Good to know that this will be an evergreen argument despite an extremely well-supported project to do just that taking place in the last two years with nothing to show for itself other than hundreds of thousands of deaths.
Not to mention the most prominent example of this this year sidestepped the Congressional stomach completely. An order of magnitude larger budget than all of the NSF grants combined spent on the war with Iran over 100 days.
Both wasteful and ineffective: it failed to achieve any of its goals and had a massive negative impact on the US economy that will continue for some time.
Does it count as fraud, though, or just gross negligence when experts had already warned that this would be the exact outcome ahead of time but were ignored?
If you gave a snap quiz to all Trump voters asking whether the cost of the Iran War or the DOGE cuts were greater, I wonder how many would get the right answer.
> despite an extremely well-supported project to do just that
a weird extremely small executive branch task force with pretty much zero power is not what i would call a well supported project in the context of the trying to reduce spending in the american government.
Congress controls the purse, doge had nothing to do with congress.
Well they certainly had enough power to fuck a lot of shit up, if not enough power to meaningfully impact the budget deficit.
Tell it to the hundreds of thousands of dead people that doge had zero power. It didn't seem to matter that their aid was congressionally allocated, so sorry if I'm skeptical that doge was ineffective because of an abundance of restraint and respect for separation of powers.
> hundreds of thousands of dead people
No reports have substantiated this talking point to my knowledge.
Also please add as an option: raise taxes on the wealthy individuals and corporations back.
https://inequality.org/article/11-charts-tax-wealthy-corpora...
This is really ambiguous:
"- stopping fraud"
And can mean many things. On the right, it often means Somali daycares, on the left it means the underfunding of the IRS so that it doesn't do audits of rich people.
I find this to be mostly a distraction:
"- figuring out how the net worth of people in Congress increases from hundreds of thousands of dollars to 10s or 100s of millions of dollars"
We should ban stock trading by members of the government, the Ro Khanna bill, but while it can be a source of corruption, it isn't a major source of inequality in the US.
This is unclear, can you be more specific as it has different answers based on one's partisan leanings:
"- addressing wasteful and ineffective programs"
I think a lot of the distortion of US policy towards the rich is a result of Citizens United and similar unrestrained lobbying funds.
“Raising taxes” is a misnomer - “restoring taxes to the level they were when we were deciding how to allocate tax revenue” is more accurate. There’s plenty of other causes of the deficit, but “Congress deciding not to take money from wealthy people and corporations to fund the services they’d promised to the rest of us” is the core. We don’t have a budget deficit, we have a tax revenue deficit.
This ball is already in motion IMO. Inflation numbers aren’t even believable and It’s already not fun.
> Inflation numbers aren’t even believable and It’s already not fun
For inflation to have an impact on the US debt, it has to be approaching the level at which the US debt is increasing. In the last year, the US debt increased by 7.6%, much higher than inflation.
From what I observe from fraud and corruption witch-hunts, they are nothing more than that. The real fraud is that government that is supposed to serve the people who elected it serves everyone else first.
There is nothing left (edit: discretionary) to cut, and there is no material fraud. Taxes must go up. Only the top 40% of Americans have any income or wealth to tax (bottom 60% of Americans have no federal tax liability). Or, as you mention, we monetize the debt, print dollars, and burn up the currency value.
https://usafacts.org/government-spending/
https://usafacts.org/answers/how-much-debt-does-the-us-have/...
> There is nothing left to cut
Hmm.... I found this, I wonder if there is any way this line item in the budget could be reduced, it looks sort of big:
https://www.usaspending.gov/agency/department-of-defense?fy=...
Correction accepted. Eight failed audits. Would love to see the will to fix this specific item, but am not confident it exists. We spent hundreds of billions on war with Iran before we forgave student loan debt and instituted Medicare for All, for example. The evidence is clear these are active choices we can make. We actively choose the bad financial policy choices through governance outcomes.
The only branch of government I have faith in at the moment is the bond market.
Pentagon fails financial audit for 8th year in a row - https://www.militarytimes.com/news/pentagon-congress/2025/12... - December 19th, 2025
Fact Check: Has the Pentagon failed its 7th audit in a row? - https://econofact.org/factbrief/has-the-pentagon-failed-its-... - December 20th, 2024
Thoughts From the Bond Vigilantes - https://www.pimco.com/us/en/insights/thoughts-from-the-bond-... - December 9th, 2024
> ...it prevented massive unconstrained expansion of credit and that seems sensible.
At the height of the Great Depression (1936), some economists proposed The Chicago Plan to separate the provision of credit from the money supply by eliminating fractional reserve banking, giving better control of the increases and contractions of credit, the elimination of bank runs, and a dramatic reduction in debt. There was a recent (2012) paper from the IMF [1] that seemed to find this actually is pretty sensible, although I do not claim to be smart enough to understand all of the implications.
[1] https://www.imf.org/en/publications/wp/issues/2016/12/31/the...
There isn't enough gold to use as a common currency.
As I understand it, all the gold that has ever been mined would fit in a cube the size of a baseball diamond.
https://www.businessinsider.com/warren-buffetts-lesson-on-go...
Nixon was responsible for ending the silver standard.
https://www.usmoneyreserve.com/news/executive-insights/when-...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silver_standard#United_States
Tying the ability to increase the money supply to a metal we have to dig out of the ground is ridiculous.
>near unlimited government credit
Really? How do we get some? And, beyond that, what do YOU think the limits should be on increasing the money supply by a sovereign nation?
A nation becomes wealthy by producing things to sell. Nothing else matters, including debt. But, we live in a world where people want to be rich, but also don't want to use resources, or build, or manufacture things, or run an empire. It's contradictory, and we are starting to see the effects.
Tying it to our goodwill, military might, and diplomacy seems like it might be a bad long term plan.
Gold based money, or eras of coinage, historically have been times of war and slavery. The debt system we are in now is far better in a lot of ways. The outcome of what happens depends on the political will deciding where the credit flows.
It is well know there weren't deep structural problems at the time of (and caused by) the gold standard...
I don't understand why people keep banging about the theoretical advantaged of a gold standard whan it was the default monetary system for centuries and we have firsthand evidence of the problems it causes (and certainly not more equality in the world!). It has been tried by the whole Earth during several generations.
If you think, like Greenspan and others, that there ought to be a mechanism to force some monetary restraint on governments, try to think of a new mechanism, because the "old way" wasn't better. We know it. Move on.
Nixon was running out of money fast- the cold war was expensive.
Responsibility is not something that the current market players want to see, whether it be through the gold standard, reasonable interest rates, or any other mechanism. They'll argue that the next big thing is simply too expensive for that sort of constraint.
Greenspan was also the subject in the weird comics "h4x0r economist"/"haxor economist", which thankfully still live on since its early internet days https://www.rdwarf.com/users/kioh/ (NSFW language)
This should be the top comment, at least for today.
I don't get this comic at all but I really miss when random stuff like this got published online!
IIRC it was Greenspan that didn’t mean to, but did disclose the use of gold swaps, so even if there is all the gold that is claimed to be in Fort Knox, the question of who owns the gold is unanswered.
For many Americans, Greenspan was the only Fed Chair known widely by name by the general public.
When I was in high school in the 90s, and just discovering the world of money and finance, I stumbled on Alan Greenspan and instantly liked some of his thinking about it. I tried my best to learn from everything he did, read every news article I could find, followed rates, the economics of money, the impact on markets, and more. I learned more about government politics and money and influence from that experience than I have since! I'll admit that my mindset about the Fed and money in general is very much due to what I learned in those impressionable years.
time to watch inside job from 2010 again
Non paywalled obituary: https://apnews.com/article/greenspan-federal-reserve-death-2...
Aside from your attempt to circumvent the supply and demand controls, I find the impact of his contributions highly inflated.
Mostly I just know Alan Greenspan for being a disciple of Ayn Rand back in the 1950s/60s. Though the Objectivists didn't like his work at the federal reserve. In 2008 he admits to being shocked that banks weren't rationally selfish.
The banks were not, the bankers were.
The guy who called the Federal Reserve the "penny in the fuse box" of the economy was not an "Ayn Rand disciple" by the time he took the chairmanship. Power as chair of the Council of Economic Advisers under Ford really transformed him and I think severed the tenuous hold he had on her principles.
Related article from around that time: https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2008/10/alan-shrugged/
The libertarian community really thought they had their fox in the hen house when he was put in charge of regulation, and he did a fair bit of deregulation, but not nearly to the extent that they wanted. In the end it was enough to trigger a major financial crisis, but not enough to completely collapse the world economy and return to the feudalism they wanted.
What regulations did he as federal reserve chair rollback and which of them caused the 2008 crash?
He killed Brooksley Born’s proposed derivatives regulations in the late 90’s.
> but not enough to completely collapse the world economy and return to the feudalism they wanted.
Don’t worry, wealthy drug addict pedophiles in Silicon Valley are carrying that torch now.
Interesting bit of trivia, Greenspan was in Ayn Rand's inner circle and read her drafts of Atlas Shrugged as it was being written, and they were close friends until her death.
Here is an old clip of Alan Greenspan explaining to Paul Ryan why the social security system can't go bankrupt.
https://youtu.be/DNCZHAQnfGU?is=CWQS-QUJB0z4EfSM
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alan_Greenspan
"Irrational exuberance" - I came to know about him when he said that around 2001. Kinda foresaw the dotcom bubble.
I'm probably a fair bit younger. I came to know the phrase, then (of) him, through the flash animation of the Happatai/Yatta song on Albino Black Sheep in the early 2000s (and these days on youtube if you search 'irrational exuberance yatta'; mildly nsfw in a few spots). Never bothered to dig into its meaning, though.
He said it in 1996.
He was proof that the position is a figurehead.
Highly recommend the extremely good multipart documentary All Watched Over By Machines Of Loving Grace by Adam Curtis for a fun and wide ranging if slightly silly look at the nexus of Greenspan, Ayn Rand, Silicon Valley, computer technology etc
NYT obituary:
Alan Greenspan, Fed Chairman Through Prosperity and Crisis, Dies at 100
non-paywall: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/06/22/us/alan-greenspan-dead.ht...
Mr "moral hazard"-- as if the people profit(eer)ing faced any...
I've always wondered if part of the 2008 bust was a psyop from his Ayn Rand beliefs.
It probably wasn't as damaging to the world as the Friedman doctrine but it was pretty darn close.
Revisionist history will tell it differently, but I remember that from the mid 1990s until about 2000 when the economy was booming yet prices weren't rising, Greenspan publicly indicated that he wasn't sure exactly why that was. Or at least that the information economy had different performance characteristics than the industrial economy, since production wasn't limited by supply but by worker productivity multipliers.
Why did the cost of living decrease in the 90s but not today? What was different then vs now? Well, after the Dot Bomb and 9/11, the US hasn't followed macroeconomic principles (the main principle being to raise interest rates during increased production to prevent inflation), examine the flip after 2000:
https://www.linkedin.com/posts/richard-clarida-085777125_wea...
Breadcrumbs:
https://financialpost.com/news/alan-greenspan-dies-at-100 (alternative article)
https://www.federalreserve.gov/boarddocs/speeches/1999/19990... (example speech)
https://www.dallasfed.org/~/media/documents/research/swe/200... (analysis pdf)
Note that policy had a greater effect on US economic decline than who the Fed chair was. Specifically, the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act (GLBA) known as the Financial Services Modernization Act of 1999 (which reversed the Glass–Steagall Act of 1933 and removed barriers in the market among banking companies, securities companies, and insurance companies) allowed investors to gamble with our savings again like before the Great Depression:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gramm-Leach-Bliley_Act
The Housing Bubble popped less than a decade later in 2008.
The Telecommunications Act of 1996 had deregulated the information economy, cementing the duopolies we see today, although the fallout from that arguably wasn't felt until after the arrival of fast mobile internet that coincided with the 2008 financial crisis, which contributed to the high communications prices we pay today vs the rest of the world (imposing a kind of privatized tax on the information economy):
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telecommunications_Act_of_1996
What I saw then was the last hurrah of US colonialism, which patterned itself off of England but used proxy wars instead of direct colonization. Loosely, keeping Asia down supported western antisocialist goals while simultaneously bolstering capitalist economies. In other words, buying shoes for $5 and selling them for $100 (times everything) allowed the US to transition from blue collar to white collar work.
That resulted in the US closing 100,000 factories under the GW Bush administration of the 2000s. And also outsourcing to China and India, the reduction of pure R&D to almost nothing, massive investment in McMansions and SUVs instead of something like renewable energy, and of course diverting perhaps $3 trillion or more to forever wars in the Middle East to prop up the declining industrial economy which depends on fossil fuels.
That's all changing now as China's buying power is passing that of the US:
https://www.capitaleconomics.com/blog/china-versus-us-size-s...
They don't want to make our stuff for pennies on the dollar anymore, and the US can't carry its own weight without massive reeducation and retooling.
But since the US wasted $40 trillion on its national debt instead of investing in the 21st century economy we thought we are going to get in the 90s, we now see prices increasing in parity with wages. In other words, nearly all excess labor productivity goes towards paying the debt ran up by the previous generation. Thomas Jefferson warned against this:
https://www.meteor.iastate.edu/gccourse/develop/jefferson.ht...
The young are paying the elderly's retirement while being told to eat less avocado toast.
The reason I'm writing this is that the powers that be will try to tell you that we need to cut government spending and taxes to outrun our economic decline. But if you understand everything I just wrote, then you'll see that the damage of 40 years of trickle-down economics and austerity has already been done.
The way out of this is self-evidently to try new approaches favored by the youth who are doing the work but not seeing the benefits like previous generations did. We're living in a second Gilded Age dominated by wage slavery and high wealth inequality:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gilded_Age
The way we overcame that was to do the opposite of everything you see the establishment promoting today:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Progressive_Era
The low-hanging fruit is getting money out of politics (reversing the Citizens United decision), closing the revolving door between the government and lobbyists, antitrust enforcement, and other popular goals.
But real progress looks like FDR-style New Deal taxation on the ultra-wealthy to pay down the public debt, forgiveness of private debts incurred by artificially inflated costs (jubilee) and public funding of the commons (education, healthcare, the energy and communications grids, anything that results in natural monopolies).
Greenspan wouldn't have liked what I just wrote at the end there. But he would have supported the ending of intergenerational debt IMHO. That's why I think it makes a good target for today's youth, when they need a litmus test for deciding whether voting for a proposed policy is in their best interest.
Pope to Tekna can Lumia Vitrol...plus,(Sobs)If you still watch Netflix, Have you added Knitting to your Netflix Plan?.