October 2022 - cypherpunks - lists.cpunks.org

Cryptocurrency: Ben Bernanke Wins Nobel Prize for Economic Idiocy, Ruin, Slavery, and Govt Violence
by grarpamp 25 Oct '22

25 Oct '22

Ron Paul: Wreck The Economy, Win A Nobel Prize http://ronpaulinstitute.org/archives/featured-articles/2022/october/17/dest… https://schiffgold.com/guest-commentaries/ron-paul-wreck-the-economy-win-a-… Ben Bernanke was one of the architects of the inflation you’re suffering from today. He won a Nobel Prize for his efforts. Bernanke rolled out quantitative easing to rescue the economy in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis. At the time, he swore it was a temporary emergency measure and that the Fed would eventually sell all of the bonds it was accumulating on its balance sheet. He insisted that it was not a debt monetization scheme. Of course, it was a debt monetization scheme. After a half-hearted effort to shrink the balance sheet a decade after the Great Recession, the Fed abandoned the effort as soon as the stock market tanked at the end of 2018. It went right back to QE and then launched QE infinity to deal with the government’s response to the pandemic. As Peter Schiff has been saying, the inflation problem of today started decades ago and Bernanke was one of the chief culprits. As Ron Paul put it, “Honoring Bernanke for his advice on what government should do when banks fail is like giving a fire safety award to an arsonist.” The following article by Ron Paul was originally published by the Ron Paul Institute. The opinions expressed do not necessarily reflect those of Peter Schiff or SchiffGold. Former Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke is a 2022 recipient of the Nobel Prize in economics for his writings on how government should respond to bank failures. Honoring Bernanke for his advice on what government should do when banks fail is like giving a fire safety award to an arsonist. Bernanke was Fed chairman when the housing bubble, created by his predecessor Alan Greenspan in the wake of the bursting of Greenspan’s tech bubble and the 9-11 attacks, exploded. When the housing market collapsed, Bernanke worked with Congress and the Bush administration to bail out big banks and Wall Street firms. In the years following the meltdown, the Bernanke-led Fed tried to “stimulate” the economy via massive money creation, near-zero interest rates, and “quantitative easing,” where the Fed injects liquidity into the market via purchases of financial assets including Treasury bonds. The Fed’s post-meltdown policies produced sluggish growth at best while laying the groundwork for the next bust. A sign that the next crash was around the corner came in September of 2019 when the Federal Reserve began pumping billions of dollars a day into the “repurchasing” market, which banks use to make overnight loans to each other, in order to keep that market’s interest rates from rising above the Fed’s target rate. The covid lockdowns then gave the Fed an excuse to push interest rates to zero and massively expand quantitative easing. The Fed’s actions are the prime culprit behind the price inflation plaguing America’s economy. The Fed has responded to the price inflation by increasing interest rates, although rates remain much lower than they would be in a free market. The fact that even these relatively small increases helped push the fragile economy into recession shows the instability of our debt-based economic system. Bernanke, and Congress, should have responded to the meltdown by letting the recession that followed the meltdown run its course. This is the only way the economy can adjust to the market distortions caused when the Fed increases the money supply and lowers interest rates. Those who worry that this “don’t do something, just stand there” approach would inflict long-term economic pain on the American people should consider the economic depression of 1920. During this depression, the Fed refrained from trying to “stimulate” the economy, and Congress actually cut spending. The result was the downturn was quickly over. Sadly, the lessons of 1920 are largely ignored by mainstream economic historians. In response to my questioning at a Financial Services Committee hearing, then-Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke admitted he did not consider gold to be money. Of course, gold and other precious metals are money because individuals have selected them whenever they had the freedom to choose a currency. One reason for this is that precious metals are uniquely suited to serve as a stable unit of account. In contrast, government rulers have favored fiat money precisely because it can never serve as an honest unit of account due to its value being constantly manipulated by central bankers. This is often done at the behest of power-hungry politicians. Therefore, under a fiat monetary system we cannot know the true value of goods and services. This is why to create a sound economy that provides prosperity we should audit then end the fed.

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Cryptocurrency: Fixes This, With Freedom
by grarpamp 25 Oct '22

25 Oct '22

Tax Cuts Do Not Cause Inflation. Printing Does... Authored by Daniel Lacalle, The narrative to attack any tax cut and defend any increase in government size is reaching feverish levels. However, we must continue to remind citizens that constantly bloating government spending and increasing the size of monetary interventions are some of the causes of the widespread impoverishment of the middle class. Constantly increasing taxes and diminishing the purchasing power of the currency is wiping out the middle class in most developed nations. Currency printing is not neutral, and it never is. It disproportionately benefits government and massively hurts real salaries and deposit savings. It is a massive transfer of wealth from savers to the indebted. Readers may say that what needs to happen is to tax the rich and corporations and all will be solved. Why do you think that many of the ultra-wealthy are extremely happy with financial repression, issuing more currency, cutting rates and higher taxes? Because the net effect is positive for them and negative for you. Financial repression is a tool that makes it more difficult for the middle class to be richer and therefore wipes out private savings and any possible competition at the top. The latest dogma is that tax cuts are negative because they boost inflation. However, it is yet another fallacy predicated on the idea that money is better off in the pocket of government. Inflation is the destruction of the purchasing power of a currency, not “rising prices.” Prices do not rise in unison due to an exogenous factor like a war unless the quantity of currency issued is higher than the growth in the productive sector. Government spending weighs close to 50% of GDP in most developed economies. One unit of currency in the pocket of government is certainly spent and even multiplied, as most of the public sector will spend that unit of currency and more via deficit. Cutting taxes does not add units of currency to the economy. It is the same quantity of currency only a bit more in the pocket of those who earned it. When governments reduce taxes, the citizens and businesses that have earned money have more in their pockets. Some might spend it, others might save it, which means investment, and others might take more credit. Tax cuts are only inflationary if they boost and extraordinary and unjustified credit impulse. This is rarely if ever the case. A unit of currency in the hands of government is certainly going to be spent, adding even more money into the system via debt and deficits. A unit of currency in the hands of those who earned it is not just likely to lead to a better capital allocation but also it is fair. Tax cuts in an inflationary environment are not just logical and just, but necessary because most governments do not deflate their tax receipts and, by keeping monetary tax rates untouched, receipts rise, and the amount of taxes paid by citizens increases. Inflation is a tax and a policy. Governments benefit from inflation collecting higher receipts due to the inflation impact on tax revenues, while citizens suffer elevated prices, higher direct and indirect taxation, and lower real wages. If increasing the size of government is always dangerous it is even more perilous in times of high inflation because the risk of malinvestment becomes a certainty. There has been a massive campaign against any tax cuts all over the world that adds to a view that all government spending is justified. The concepts of efficiency, saving and prioritization have been abandoned and the administration is perceived as an entity that cannot perform any of those measures and needs constantly rising revenues to undertake its duties, yet all is false. Taxes are not set because the government needs more revenues, but to pay for services and adjusted to the reality of the economy. When the public sector becomes an all-consuming and never-saving entity it does not contribute to growth and productivity, it prevents them. Governments use any excuse to increase their size in the economy and using constant emergencies or alleged crises is the easiest way to advance a confiscatory and extractive view of the economy where citizens and businesses are viewed as cash machines of the political sector, where the private sector is at the service of the government and not the other way around. Tax cuts do not increase inflation, it is giving a bit more of the existing money to the ones who earned it. What increases inflation, always, is bloating government spending, perpetuating deficits, and monetizing it by printing constantly depreciated currencies. Government spending is not the engine of the economy. Tax hikes are not the only solution to bad administrations. Printing money is not a tool for growth, but one for cronyism. Upside down economics does not work. We need to return to monetary and fiscal sanity. A tax wedge of almost 40% of income is not normal. It is confiscatory. If we want to reduce inflation, we need to limit the uncontrolled policies those that create it: central banks and governments.

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grancrap's website
by punk 24 Oct '22

24 Oct '22

this is just hilarious https://anti-empire.com/team/ an incredibly brain-dead pentagon outlet that publishes anti-russian propaganda 24/7 poses as 'anti-empire' - yeah, wouldn't expect anything else from the pentagon.

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Employment fraud - Wikipedia
by Gunnar Larson 24 Oct '22

24 Oct '22

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Employment_fraud

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Calls for Juan Garofalo to be tortured for 'inciting genocide'
by professor rat 24 Oct '22

24 Oct '22

Sorry - calls for Russian state TV presenter Anton Krasovsky to be tried for 'inciting genocide' TV host sacked over disgusting tirade news.com.au 7 hours ago

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jim bell's technonazi utopia
by punk 24 Oct '22

24 Oct '22

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2022/08/inside-fog-data-science-secretive-com…

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The Fed’s Trading Scandal Broadens into a Scandal with the Mega Banks It "Regulates"
by Gunnar Larson 24 Oct '22

24 Oct '22

Wall Street On Parade has posted a new item: The Fed’s Trading Scandal Broadens into a Scandal with the Mega Banks It "Regulates" https://wallstreetonparade.com/2022/10/the-feds-trading-scandal-broadens-in… By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: October 24, 2022 ~ Jeanna Smialek, Federal Reserve and Economy Reporter, New York Times Last Thursday, Jeanna Smialek, who reports on the Fed for the New York Times, broke the news that the President of the St. Louis Fed, James Bullard, gave a private, invitation-only briefing on October 14 to clients of [...] If the hyperlink above is not active, please paste it into your browser and press "Go" to read the full article. You received this e-mail because you asked to be notified when new updates are posted. If you ever wish to stop receiving these emails from us, just email me at pamk741(a)aol.com with the word "Unsubscribe" in the subject line. Best regards, Pam Martens, Editor, Wall Street On Parade

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We Do Not Fear Anarchy, We Invoke It!
by professor rat 24 Oct '22

24 Oct '22

Podcast - interview with anarchist author and historian, Robert Graham about the split in the historic left that led to the birth of the anarchist movement https://anarchistnews.org/content/first-international-and-birth-anarchist-m… Pay no attention to that repost behind the curtain

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Adman Backstabber as world-historical jackass
by professor rat 24 Oct '22

24 Oct '22

I thought cypherpunks was created to discuss the revolutionary effect crypto-anarchist infrastructure would have on all existing philosophers & kings. Why ’ Coderpunks ’ was hived off for the techno-bores. This impression only survived three months - once I got on the actual thing ( Aug 2001 ) “Where did Hegel get his ideas from?” It is getting too far away from the main purpose of this blog to attempt to answer that in any detail but if a one-word answer is possible the answer is “Plato”. Plato’s Republic with its ideal of a polity ruled by “philosopher kings” has always had a lot of appeal to Leftists – who mentally elect themselves as the philosopher kings concerned – so it should be no surprise that Hegel liked Plato too. http://marxwords.blogspot.com/2005_01_01_marxwords_archive.html

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Bill Binney a regular passenger on Gramps giant garbage scow.
by professor rat 24 Oct '22

24 Oct '22

Since being wrong about Crimea in 2014, Binney appeared on Fox News at least ten times between September 2016 and November 2017. He has been a frequent guest on RT and has been frequently cited on Breitbart News. On January 23, 2018, Binney made an appearance on ALEX JONES InfoWars. Then; after Joe Biden won the 2020 election and Donald Trump refused to concede, Binney doubted the official results and claimed his belief that there had been large-scale voter fraud. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Binney_(intelligence_official) GIGO all over his sorry face

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