Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone, prevent the dog from barking with a juicy bone, silence the pianos, and with muffled drum announce to the listeners that the daily Peter Schiff radio show has come:
Alas, it appears that to listen to the full show via download podcasts you need to pay a monthly subscription, though there is an archive from which you can download full show MP3s directly, should you be able to deal with the hassle. Being a skinflint and a creature of the iPhone, I’ll wait until Mr Schiff releases them all as free podcasts, which hopefully will be soon, before I partake of the experience, but hardcore Schiff fans may wish to start listening sooner.
Peter announces his new daily radio show, which replaces Wall Street Unspun, at the tail end of the the first of the videos below. In this first video, Mr Schiff also begins with an analysis of various currencies, including the news that Singapore is going to allow its dollar to rise against the US dollar. He then examines Bernanke’s remarkable claim that price inflation in the US is too low, which Schiff puts down to Bernanke’s Keynesian reliance upon the heavily discredited Phillips curve; most thought that this vampire had been successfully staked through the heart in the 1970s, especially with the re-emergence of Hayek and the Austrians.
[Apparently a complete stagflationary decade of failure in the 1970s and a situation of both rising price inflation and rising unemployment, which Phillips had earlier claimed was impossible, was not enough to slay this particular vampire. In the land of the Undead Keynesians and the Zombie Banks, Bernanke is the drop of blood that has revived the smoking ashes of the Phillips curve, and its bat-winged sons, the ‘non-accelerating inflation rate of unemployment’ NAIRU model and the ‘dynamic stochastic general equilibrium’ DSGE model. Both of these models are as equally fantastical as their vampirical ancestor, and based upon mathematical curves on graphs rather than the economic decisions of individual human beings and the realisation that counterfeiting done by governments is still counterfeiting, albeit legalised counterfeiting. Just as a private basement counterfeiter may boost local trade for a time, before everyone realises that they are being paid in funny money, once the drug wears off from the injection of more currency into an economy, the drug of extra currency usually causes more problems than it solves, though admittedly the NAIRU model is slightly better on this front than the DSGE model. It has always seemed strange to me that all of these money-crank theories and models forever dance around the dead stinking elephant in the middle of the ballroom, which is that counterfeiting is generally seen by everyone as a very bad thing, perhaps without even knowing why, but that somehow counterfeiting becomes a very good thing when it is done by a government-licensed agency with a fancy badge. Everyone of us, including central bank chairmen, knows that counterfeiting is wrong and that it is bound to produce deleterious complex effects, as described in the Austrian Business Cycle Theory. The bigger question to my mind is why does everyone have such a blind spot in their minds when it comes to government action? The very presence of a government administrator in charge of any policy, no matter how stupid or dangerous, somehow makes it all right, or even good. Until we can shake this almost universal mirage that government men are not angelic super men who can produce thousands of loaves and fishes from a few rocks and stones, but are merely ordinary men with smooth tongues enveloped in fancy cloaks with fancy badges, we shall never move into a world of progress, truth, and honesty.]In the second video, Peter Schiff talks about the many corrections this week in the markets, following the announcement of a tighter monetary policy in the Middle Kingdom and higher interest rates for the Chinese people’s currency, the renminbi.
