I learned long ago that when our leaders make seemingly idiotic decisions, they are not idiots, but liars. Let me explain how and when I first realized this.
I completed my economics degree in 1990. I had lived through the inflation of the 1970s and the high interest rates and recession of the 1980s. Not surprisingly, I had a great interest in monetary policy. During the inflation of the 1970s, many quasi-economic theories emerged about why it was happening—cost push inflation, the oil price shock, etc. And many non-sensical solutions were proposed and attempted. For example, here in Canada we had the famous “wage and price controls,” which achieved nothing.
During the 1980s, a well-known Canadian economist, Thomas Courchene, wrote a series of books explaining in detail how and why this inflation happened in Canada. In short, the Bank of Canada lost control of the money supply because they were tracking a narrow definition of money (M1) and failed to realize that developments in the banking business had produced new financial products that were “money” as ordinary people considered it. (As unhelpful as it is, in economics we understand that money is simply whatever people decide is money. That could be paper currency, gold coins, seashells, Bitcoin, or a hundred other things.) The increase in the money supply caused inflation, nothing else. It affirmed Milton Friedman’s famous statement that “inflation is always and everywhere a monetary phenomenon.” Inflation was finally and slowly brought under control when Paul Volcker, chairman of the Federal Reserve System in the US, raised interest rates high enough (higher than the rate of inflation) to curtail the growth of the money supply. Of course, it caused a serious recession, as standard economic theory explains.
So, I was aghast in the late 1990s when central banks all over the world started acting strangely. They dropped interest rates way too low, and it sparked a financial bubble, known as the dotcom bubble. Every economist should have been able to see this was caused by excessively low interest rates. But central bankers blamed everyone else. Allan Greenspan famously blamed investors for “irrational exuberance,” when the blame sat squarely in his own lap.
That’s when I started to realize that all these central bank economists couldn’t be idiots. They knew more than I did. They had to know they were causing the bubble, which is a type of inflation known as asset price inflation. They were just lying about it. But it took me another quarter century to figure out why.
Another example of “idiocy” was the long gun registry in Canada about twenty years ago. I was a member of the Canadian Firearms Association at that time and the president published a detailed article about his discussions with government officials and the carefully documented report he gave them. The report explained how the government legislation was incapable of achieving its stated objectives, had been tried else where and failed, and what steps could be taken to achieve the government’s stated objectives. Everything he explained was ignored by the government. A decade later, billions of dollars wasted, with none of the stated objectives being achieved, the long gun registry was completely shut down.
Once again, we blamed “idiots” in government. But our central bankers are not idiots, neither are other government officials. I realized that when intelligent and highly educated people take actions that cannot possibly achieve their stated objectives, there is another possibility. They are not idiots, but liars. They know what they are doing, but their real objectives are not their stated objectives. Watch what the real outcomes are. Those were the real objectives.
For the past quarter century, we have seen the same story repeated over and over. As I explain in my upcoming book, the Federal Reserve planned the money creation in 2019, created trillions of dollars in 2020, and knew perfectly well that this would cause significant inflation starting in 2021. When they initially said it was “transitory inflation,” they were lying through their teeth.
This is the first key to understanding what’s really going on: our leaders are not idiots, they’re liars. This is hard to believe; it’s almost beyond belief. It is more than ironic; it’s beyond ironic. But it’s an essential change of perception if we want to understand what’s really going on in the world.
That’s one of the main themes in my upcoming book. The title is, “What the Hell Is Going On? – The Web of Fraud That Is Enslaving Everyone and How We Can Escape to Freedom.” Look for it soon at your favorite online bookstore, or at my website, www.ComingHomeSpirit.com.
God Bless You!
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