Regarding gas prices, Bush's wars drove up the price of oil. And then just when our adventures in Iraq finally came to an end, the money printing began in earnest. Obama hasn't helped by keeping Keystone XL in political limbo, pushing offshore drilling outside the US, generally assaulting the energy sector with regulation, and setting fire to several more countries in the Middle East (Libya, Syria, Tunisia, Egypt, et alia).
If I interpret you correctly, you state that prices would have fallen if the Fed had sat around and done nothing. I believe we may simply disagree on the desirability of this: some may prize debtors, but I value savers. And I thus generally think of falling prices for household goods (the dreaded deflation!) as a good thing. However, the Fed looks at one of its primary duties as propping up the prices of mortgages. The ostensible purpose is to protect "underwater homeowners" who spent beyond their means. The actual purpose is to take toxic waste off the balance sheets of banks and to put this hot potato in the laps of dollar holders (not just taxpayers, but all dollar holders, including the Chinese).
Anyway, we can talk all we want about these macroscopic phenomena, but ultimately what it boils down to is that people want the Fed to "help the poor" and not simply stand there. And the optics look like they are helping the poor by diluting the dollar and thereby inflating away debts (i.e. the inflation which "doesn't exist" will soon be called a feature and indeed set as a goal by the likes of Krugman).
However, the Fed is also inflating away earning power, and the banks are the first recipients of these inflated dollars, thereby profiting the most from said inflation. The result is a policy that actually hurts the poor far more than simple inaction and rewards the very richest - not entrepreneurs or technologists but the banks that receive direct deposits from the Fed for its "purchases" of mortgage-backed securities (meaning $1 purchases of things worth $.01, or $0).
Bitcoin is a strike against the Fed and the banks by the Valley, perhaps a critical blow. It is very surprising to me that pg (or anyone) could think that USG could possibly have released something like Bitcoin, as it strikes at the very core of the US government's power: the ability to print money.
I agree with you in that I value savings more than debt (hate the current savings rates) and that the Fed does nothing to help the poor (but that's not their job or incentive to do so and I never thought of it that way ever). The Fed had to do what it did because the banks would have failed otherwise. And if the literally too big-to-fail (and prosecute and everything else) banks failed, then the recession would have been far worst than the Great Depression.
However, a lot of people who still held on to their mortgages do depend on the value of homeprices to stay up, (and the value of a college degree while we're at it since student loans recently overtook creditcard debt).
We're getting way off topic here though. I'll just close out with I think the best solutions are to:
1) Bring back the Glass-Steagall Act and don't allow Investment banks to gamble with consumer money
2) Once (1) is actually in place, then the next time a banking crisis comes around, let all the Investment banks fail and only prop up the ones that actually provide deposits, loans and savings. That will right a terrible wrong done 5 years ago.
3) I came up with this recently after reading Liar's Poker and a followup interview a few years ago of Micheal Lewis and John Merriwether: make all banks private (non-public) corporations again. The only bank that is not fully public is Goldman Sachs (yes, they went public in the 90s, but there are still partners who essentially control it) and is probably part of the reason they do better than everyone else.
Regarding gas prices, Bush's wars drove up the price of oil. And then just when our adventures in Iraq finally came to an end, the money printing began in earnest. Obama hasn't helped by keeping Keystone XL in political limbo, pushing offshore drilling outside the US, generally assaulting the energy sector with regulation, and setting fire to several more countries in the Middle East (Libya, Syria, Tunisia, Egypt, et alia).
If I interpret you correctly, you state that prices would have fallen if the Fed had sat around and done nothing. I believe we may simply disagree on the desirability of this: some may prize debtors, but I value savers. And I thus generally think of falling prices for household goods (the dreaded deflation!) as a good thing. However, the Fed looks at one of its primary duties as propping up the prices of mortgages. The ostensible purpose is to protect "underwater homeowners" who spent beyond their means. The actual purpose is to take toxic waste off the balance sheets of banks and to put this hot potato in the laps of dollar holders (not just taxpayers, but all dollar holders, including the Chinese).
Anyway, we can talk all we want about these macroscopic phenomena, but ultimately what it boils down to is that people want the Fed to "help the poor" and not simply stand there. And the optics look like they are helping the poor by diluting the dollar and thereby inflating away debts (i.e. the inflation which "doesn't exist" will soon be called a feature and indeed set as a goal by the likes of Krugman).
However, the Fed is also inflating away earning power, and the banks are the first recipients of these inflated dollars, thereby profiting the most from said inflation. The result is a policy that actually hurts the poor far more than simple inaction and rewards the very richest - not entrepreneurs or technologists but the banks that receive direct deposits from the Fed for its "purchases" of mortgage-backed securities (meaning $1 purchases of things worth $.01, or $0).
Bitcoin is a strike against the Fed and the banks by the Valley, perhaps a critical blow. It is very surprising to me that pg (or anyone) could think that USG could possibly have released something like Bitcoin, as it strikes at the very core of the US government's power: the ability to print money.