Here We Go Again……..
Financial bubbles are not accidents but rather inevitable outcomes of our asset-backed banking system. To illustrate: imagine a homeowner who owns a $1 million house free and clear. He goes to a bank and borrows $800,000 against the house. This credit money springs into existence as an accounting entry of a private bank—it is the creation of credit out of nothing. The borrower goes out into the market with these newly created funds and starts purchasing other assets: stocks, perhaps, or a weekend house. The new money drives prices higher, including those of the assets that form the collateral of the banking system. Since its collateral value has increased, the banking system is happy to increase its loans to borrowers, which pushes prices yet higher, and so on in a positive feedback loop. Price signals then prompt over-development, which
eventually lowers rents, which causes borrowers to default, the fractional reserve
process goes into reverse, and the banking system collapses.
Irving Fisher, whom Milton Freidman anointed “the greatest economist the
United States has ever produced,” described it thus:
In boom times, the expansion of circulating medium accelerates the
pace by raising prices, and creating speculative profits. Thus, with new
money raising prices and rising prices conjuring up new money, the
inflation proceeds in an upward spiral till a collapse occurs, after which
the contraction of our supply of money and credit, with falling prices
and losses in place of profits, produces a downward spiral generating
bankruptcy, unemployment, and all the other evils of depression.
CREDIT INSANITY
Performance_Update_2018_04 (1)
