In case you missed it, former Federal Reserve Chair Ben Bernanke won this year’s Nobel Prize in economics. He was victorious for his “research” work in the 1980s and his role in fueling, er, fighting the Great Recession.
But it goes to show that the Nobel committee is comprised of statists who will only award this prize to those who champion more government.
Over on the Mises Institute website, Robert Aro discussed “Helicopter Ben” and share an excerpt from a paper he penned in 2022, titled “Deflation – making sure ‘it’ doesn’t happen here.”
Here is a passage on the printing press:
“Like gold, U.S. dollars have value only to the extent that they are strictly limited in supply. But the U.S. government has a technology, called a printing press (or, today, its electronic equivalent), that allows it to produce as many U.S. dollars as it wishes at essentially no cost. By increasing the number of U.S. dollars in circulation, or even by credibly threatening to do so, the U.S. government can also reduce the value of a dollar in terms of goods and services, which is equivalent to raising the prices in dollars of those goods and services. We conclude that, under a paper-money system, a determined government can always generate higher spending and hence positive inflation.”
One can only fathom how Bernanke would have handled the coronavirus pandemic and today’s subsequent inflation shock.
The Ben Blitzkrieg or the Powell Putsch? Pick your poison.
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