In the face of this week’s market meltdown—which has been called the worst financial crisis since WWII—the current crop of U.S. presidential candidates are preaching a hodgepodge of trite economic boosterism and disastrous governmental intervention. Unsurprisingly, the elephant in the room is Ron Paul, the political leper of anointed establishment politics, who just happens to have a massive, growing, devoted following capable of breaking fundraising records in support of him, and who has real plans to avert the global depression which is almost certainly on the way.
Romney has praised the Federal Reserve’s panic cut in the federal funds rate by 75 basis points. The cut, however, has earned round condemnation from most delegates to the World Economic Forum, who fear the move is prolonging the inevitable correction of an over-inflated marketplace.
Obama believes the severe economic woes—the symptom of hundreds of trillions of dollars of under-regulated high-risk financial instruments known as derivatives, a fiat currency, and the staggering debt and deficit the federal government is creating in foreign adventurism—can be solved by “saying to banks that they have to invest in their communities.”
McCain has been shamelessly trumpeting the old political hogwash that despite the crashing market, spiraling currency and signs of crisis in some of the largest institutional lenders in the country, “the fundamental underpinnings of our economy are strong.”
All agree that Bush’s harebrained scheme to increase inflation by printing money and handing it out in rebate cheques—a scheme with questionable short-term benefits and no long-term benefits—is a great idea.
All, that is, except for Paul. Paul has spoken and written at length about the inflation tax, ….