Financial Sense Newshour In Depth Interviews

Jim welcomes author and Washington Post columnist Neil Irwin to discuss his new book, “The Alchemists: Three Central Bankers and a World on Fire”. The book focuses on the world’s most powerful men never elected to public office; Ben Bernanke of the Federal Reserve, Mervyn King of the Bank of England, and Jean-Claude Trichet of the European Central Bank. Mr. Irwin initially looks at the origins of central banking and then takes the reader into the Great Financial Crisis and its aftermath with the story of these three men and the extraordinary power they have over our collective fate, and that of the global economy.

In an urgent follow-up to his best-selling Why Your World Is About To Get A Whole Lot Smaller, Jeff Rubin argues that the end of cheap oil means the end of growth. What it will be like to live in a world where growth is over?

Economist Laurence Kotlikoff, (co-author with Scott Burns) of the new book, "The Clash of Generations" joins Jim to discuss the book, as well as potential solutions to our critical debt and deficit issues. Professor Kotlikoff believes the US is actually in worse financial shape than the PIIGS countries. He also notes that investors should avoid long-term Treasury bonds, and now is the time to sell them if you own them.

A reserve currency can only function as such if there is a general consensus that it provides a stable store of value. Without this trust, money, no matter what form it takes, will be abandoned—either suddenly in a crisis, or gradually over time—in favor of something else. "The Golden Revolution" looks at how the world is rapidly moving toward some form of global metallic standard, in which money, at least in official, international transactions, is linked directly to gold, silver, or both.

When the United States stopped backing dollars with gold in 1968, the nature of money changed. All previous constraints on money and credit creation were removed and a new economic paradigm took shape. Economic growth ceased to be driven by capital accumulation and investment as it had been since before the Industrial Revolution. Instead, credit creation and consumption began to drive the economic dynamic. In "The New Depression: The Breakdown of the Paper Money Economy," Richard Duncan introduces an analytical framework, The Quantity Theory of Credit, that explains all aspects of the calamity now unfolding: its causes, the rationale for the government's policy response to the crisis, what is likely to happen next, and how those developments will affect asset prices and investment portfolios.

Transcript

All paper money systems in history have ended in failure. Either they collapsed in chaos, or society returned to commodity money before that could happen. Drawing upon novel new research, Paper Money Collapse conclusively illustrates why paper money systems—those based on an elastic and constantly expanding supply of money as opposed to a system of commodity money of essentially fixed supply—are inherently unstable and why they must lead to economic disintegration.

In Leverage: How Cheap Money Will Destroy the World, well-known market commentator Karl Denninger literally follows the money, tracing the path it has taken through history and discovers a shocking truth—the power to control a nation's purse strings is addictive, and when that power falls into the hands of only a select few, they will pull the levers of government and policy to enrich themselves at the expense of everyone else. History is littered with the stories of collapsed monetary systems, and in every case the debasement of the currency in question, and the disasters that followed, can be directly blamed on excessive leverage, deployed in ill-intentioned and fraudulent ways by the elite.

One of the biggest scandals in American politics is waiting to explode: the full story of the inside game in Washington shows how the permanent political class enriches itself at the expense of the rest of us. 

RED ALERT is a provocative and frightening look at the growing political, economic, and social power of China and the threat that nation poses to the Western world.

"The Limits to Growth" (Meadows, 1972) generated unprecedented controversy with its predictions of the eventual collapse of the world's economies. First hailed as a great advance in science, "The Limits to Growth" was subsequently rejected and demonized. However, with many national economies now at risk and global peak oil apparently a reality, the methods, scenarios, and predictions of "The Limits to Growth" are in great need of reappraisal. In "The Limits to Growth Revisited," Ugo Bardi examines both the science and the polemics surrounding this work, and in particular the reactions of economists that marginalized its methods and conclusions for more than 30 years.