The Cause of the Crisis

It is popular to blame the current economic crisis on the free market, and to turn to government for the solution. However, I believe that the opposite is true: the root cause of the crisis is government policies, and more government intervention is likely to exacerbate our problems in the long term, rather than to solve them.

Let me be clear that I do not think that financial markets should be entirely unregulated. Some regulations are appropriate. But I do not think that any sort of regulations would have completely prevented this crisis, nor was lack of them the cause.

There was a huge bubble in real estate. The bubble burst. The existence of the bubble was the problem.

Sub prime mortgages, credit default swaps, and all that may have been the straw that broke the camel's back, or the manner in which more fundamental problems manifested, but they were not the root cause of our trouble.

The root cause of our trouble, the reason why there was a bubble in the first place, is the Federal Reserve system, fiat money, and to a lesser extent, our system of fractional reserve banking.

Since its creation in 1913, the Fed has continually inflated the money supply, creating new money which enables government to spend more without directly taxing people, but taxing them indirectly through inflation. Inflationary monetary policy is also the cause of economic boom-bust cycles. In the most recent case, the Fed pushed interest rates down to an artificially low level from 2002-2005. This caused excess liquidity to flow into our economy, and all that money had to go somewhere. Much of it went into real estate, creating a bubble which, as all bubbles, would eventually burst.

The Japanese government contributed to this as well. For nearly a decade, they pushed real interest rates to near zero. Investors borrowed billions of dollars for nearly no cost from Japanese banks, and invested the money in US markets, where they could earn a reasonable rate of return, and pocket the difference in interest as profit. Outcome: bubble.

All of this is possible for one reason: fiat money. Before the creation of the Fed, US money was tied to gold. The government could not arbitrarily create more of it, because it could not create more gold. This kept the money supply in check, and prevented government manipulation of interest rates. While on the gold standard, there were few booms and busts; growth was steadier, and inflation was very low. Since then, our money is not tied to anything of intrinsic value; there are no limits on how much of it government can print. And since then, we have suffered from one depression/recession after another, with bubbles in between, and constant inflation which saps money from the middle class and transfers it to government and those who suckle from its tit.

I can name perhaps a dozen other factors which led or contributed to the financial crisis, and government is to blame for many of them as well. But we will never stop this from happening again as long as we ignore the root of the problem. The idea that government should control our money supply, should have a monopoly on legal tender, and should be allowed to manipulate interest rates, is the fundamental flaw in our thinking. Until we correct it, we will continue to lurch from bubble to crisis.

These are not my ideas. These are the ideas of the Austrian school of economists. They are widely ignored by the media, but actively promoted by leaders such as Ron Paul, the Cato institute, the Meises institute, Lew Rockwell, and others. And they not only explain, but actually predicted our economic crisis.

http://mises.org/
http://www.lewrockwell.com/
http://www.campaignforliberty.com/
http://cato.org/