Posted by
Andrews on Friday, April 03, 2009 10:16:05 AM
My regular readers know I have been
critical of Pat Buchanan, but
his most recent column is absolutely correct, so I feel the need to give him some praise for seeing the real cause of our problems. I do note that, old time protectionist that he is, he omits
the harm done by Smoot-Hawley, but other than that, his analysis is on the money. (No pun intended.) Our current financial crisis
is not the result of bad loans or the CRA or even Fannie and Freddie. All of those helped
exacerbate the problem, and
directed the form our collapse would take, but as I have been saying for some time, the real culprit is
the Fed and the
unbridled inflation we have been experiencing. (My one other objection is the focus on the period form 2000 to present, as the Clinton administration inflated equally recklessly. The dot-com bubble was nothing but another inflationary bubble, just like our housing one.)
I really have very little to add, as I have been
flogging this topic to death. It is simply nice to finally have some other writers recognizing that this is not a lending crisis but a monetary one.
POSTSCRIPT
I am also happy to see economists and others dismissing the absurd "
the war ended the depression" argument. Granted, the Austrian economists did so a few decades ago, but in recent years it seemed even otherwise sound economists had either accepted that canard or decided it wasn't worth refuting, so it is nice to hear it refuted explicitly once more.