Is Our Money Broken?
Join Reason on YouTube and Facebook at 1 p.m. Eastern for a discussion with Lyn Alden about her new book, Broken Money.
"At its core, money is a ledger," writes investment analyst Lyn Alden in her new book Broken Money: Why Our Financial System is Failing Us and How We Can Make it Better.
And if money is a ledger, the most important question to consider, she says, is "who controls the ledger?"
Join Zach Weissmueller this Thursday at 1 p.m. ET on Reason's YouTube channel for a conversation with Alden about her book, the history of money, the way that central banking has distorted the economy and U.S. foreign policy, and her proposed path forward for transitioning the world to better, more sound money in the future.
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It's not broken. It's (mal)functioning as designed.
The purpose of money is ONLY to represent easily transferred and traded work. The purpose of an economy is simply to bring order to work and trade. It is a fiction of our creation.
Work doesn’t grow like interest or reduce like debt. Both represent the corruption of money to benefit the wealthy.
The concept of interest is how money has been broken for thousands of years. In the earliest recorded Jewish religious texts faithful Jews are instructed to charge interest only to non Jews.
Freemasonry is a global pyramid scheme based on lies and secrecy that necessarily worship Satan to the corrupt benefit of the wealthy. Jews claim ownership of it. One third of the founders were Freemasons.
Now we have recessions and depressions that have no relationship to our societies ability to work, to steal people’s earned wealth.
Of course our money and economy is corrupted. We are trained, brainwashed, to accept our fiction as fact. What possible motivation could the élite wealthy ruling class have to promote fairness?
Follow the money.
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"A Virginia farmer is in hock to a NY stock jobber who is in hock to a London Banker"....Thomas Jefferson in John Adams..
Central Banks are honestly the root of all evil. They enrich the well connected, lower living standards by maleinvestments, cause untold pain and suffering to families and people's physical and mental well being, and fund wars. The in many ways fuel inequity and degeneracy. As the Great Ron Paul said..they are immoral, illegal and bad economics.
The market should decide what money is not govt. And I'd trust gold miners over idiot fools like Bernanke and Yellen.
End the Fed and you put down the entire crony hedge fund and wall street banksters..also stop the US from killing millions to appease the folks demanding to set scores straight in some weird old world grievances.
The no Central Bank period from 1836 to 1914 was the period when robber brains stole from everyone and the lack of a Central Bank enabled that.
Is there any disaffected "sky is falling" misfit to whom Reason would not provide a platform?
I have a bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering and a master’s degree in engineering management, with a focus on engineering economics and financial modeling. I used to work as an electrical engineer at an aviation facility, and over the course of a decade I worked my way up from being an intern to being the lead engineer and running the day-to-day operations and finances of the facility, before retiring early at age 33 with financial independence.
Not enough credentials for you?
I'm glad to be a misfit to the Rev here. I have a BS in Physics, BS in Astronomy, and MS in Space Science. I have worked for NASA at Johnson Space Center 25+
Misfit!
Any libertarian who talks about "our money" has already lost the plot, implicitly assuming some kind of collective design, control, and/or ownership of the monetary system.
Money ought to be fully private and market driven, period.
https://economics-charts.com/chart-of-consumer-price-index-1800-2005/
Shows US inflation over two centuries. Rises during wars, deflates afterwards. What's notable is how steady prices were before creation of the Fed in 1913, and how nasty inflation has been since.
Anyone who think central banking helps the little people is an idiot.
"Rises during wars, deflates afterwards"
And what happens now that being in wars is the permanent state of things for this country?
Actually DEflation was a massive problem prior to 1913.
The privatized money creation also led directly to massive economic crises in 1837, 1857, 1873, 1893, and 1907. Massive corruption contributed to the ones in 1837 and 1873; that is what lack of oversight gives you. The one in 1873 lasted until the end of the decade; the ones in 1893 and 1907 didn't last as long only because a team of oligarchs led by JP Morgan basically took over the economy for a while. We almost had another in 1914. Morgan was gone but William G. McAdoo prevented it by printing massive amounts of paper currency and closing the stock markets for four months to address the lack of money caused by all the Europeans withdrawing their investments to fight their war. So you don't need a Central Bank only a political appointment Treasury Secretary controlling the money supply.
You cannot wear out a tractor faster than the government wears out your money. That was true 20-years ago. Recently; you can't even wear out a car faster than the government wears out your money.
You might think tax is the only thing government STEALS from you but just wait until you save all your $'s for retirement and find out that your savings for the last 30-years of work there will be about 1-year worth of it to live on after government drains your earnings via their funny money.
Ding ding ding! Government will fulfill its promise to pay you $X, it's just that $X won't buy you S.
My retirement funds are doing fine. Sorry you don't make good investment decisions.
https://twitter.com/EndWokeness/status/1719849765578404186?t=QT7BEYpwZIkzIS425Ja3Sw&s=19
She did the meme.
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Every attack on the Fed I've seen has been a smokescreen to conceal the fact that sumptuary laws--NOT the Fed--caused every Panic, Crash, Depression and War since 1837. Even Friedman makes this mistake. He and Schwartz noted that a Crash occurred, like some ineffable coincidence, then jumped on the Federal Reserve system for responding thus instead of suchwise. The Fed never had the authority to repeal the prohibition laws banning production and trade that collapsed the economy in the first place.
No.
If you actually look at every panic, all were caused by government interference in markets, whether it's war, borrowing like there's no tomorrow, building obsolete infrastructure, legislating against new tech, it doesn't matter.
Just look at the last few post-WW II financial meltdowns if you're too lazy to start before 1837.
The root cause of panics, crashes and depressions may well be bad laws. Nevertheless, the Fed was justified as an institution that would fix this, instead it has made things demonstrably worse.
So, let's get rid of the Fed and let's get rid of these other laws.
Correct. The Fed didn't create the incredibly stupid Smoot Hawley tariff act. Which had lower tariffs for some items than Trump's stupid tariffs.
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