tell the ECB to manufacture peace, and plenty of it! Then we can saturate the Middle East with it. All problems solved!

Robert Peston works for the BBC. How can you still be expecting any sensible commentary from that hopeless organisation.

Despite his notional neutrality Robert Peston is a born and bred Labour supporter (his Dad's a Labour Peer FFS!).

As with all collectivists he believes that the ECB can print as much money as it likes, what he is not telling us is the consequences of doing that - inflation and possibly even hyperinflation.

This is EXACTLY WHY the Germans forbade the ECB from just rolling the printing press.

However, even though he is a graduate of PPE from Baliol College, Oxford and should be aware of the dangers of inflation, his commitment to the collectives dream of a Federal Europe is more important then turning the population of Europe into paupers.

Utter bastard.

Schlichter was good on this a few days ago.

His conclusion - they really mean it, they are going to create unlimited amounts of paper money.

They seem to have forgotten what the result will be.

Or perhaps this is another way of creating a "beneficial crisis" which will advance The Project.

No price, it seems, is too high for them to make us pay for their vanity empire.

Out now!

Nuke, they've been manufacturing plenty of it and trying to shove down the throats of the residents of the Middle East - who, despite the obvious need, just keep spitting it out.

This is also (of course) the view of Mr Prichard of the Daily Telegraph (the leading conservative newspaper in Britain).

Brian is correct - it is a general view. Not a matter of party politics or anything like that.

This is a systematic failure in Western civilization (not a matter of "which person is in charge" but a failure of the system of ideas) - a belief that the correct response to an economic crises is for the Central Bank (in this case the ECB) to produce more money.

And if this does not work (or works for a time - and then everything gets worse) the Central Bank should produce even more money, and if.... (well you get the picture).

Where does this "general view" come from?

It comes from the education system - the media are only repeating what they were taught in school and university.

And the followers of Milton Friedman (on this central point) did not really oppose the followers of John Keynes.

Indeed it is from Milton Friedman that the infamous quote that, in a crises, money should be "thrown from helecopters" comes. Whether Milton Friedman really believed this (or whether he believed it all his life) is debateable - but his followers certainly believe it. Not just the senile ones (like what is left of S.B. over at the Financial Times), but the academic mainstream ones also.

Modern Chicago is no real alternative to Cambridge - for they both cling to the same fallacy.

Even the Marxists (at least since P. Straffa) mix Keynesian language in with their Marxist doctrines.

Although, I suspect, they do not really believe this stuff.

On the contrary - I suspect the Marxists know that a policy of "monetary expansion" leads to economic and social breakdown - and support it for that very reason.

Ironically, on the matter of the true effects of monetary expansion, we (the libertarians) may have more in common with the Chicago (or Chicago Hype Park area anyway) Comrades (including the one who is sitting in the Whitehouse) than we have with a lot of the supposedly "free market" Chicago School.

It is just that they (the Comrades) long for the consequences, economic and social breakdown, that we dread.

The problem is that Peston is in big company, because he faithfully absorbed the macroeconomic views propagated in our universities. The other night, I went to a dinner hosted by a small private bank (I won't say which, it was an off the record evening). I asked one of the economists - obviously a very smart man - whether he thought the days of elastic, fiat money were coming to a close. He gave me one of those funny looks that we "Austrians" tend to get. He trotted out the old line about how the 19th 19th Century was a period of constant bank failures, volatility and of course, to use the ultimate insult, deflation.

Never mind, of course, that the 20th Century has been full of booms and busts (1970s, the late 80s, the late 90s in Asia, the Russian debt default, the sub-prime mortgage bubble, the eurozone disaster, etc). You would think that advocates of fiat money might want to learn a touch of humility.

Yes, the 19th Century had its volatility (such as in the early 19th Century when banknotes were not backed by gold and banks over-issued, or during the boom and busts of the 1840s and periods before and after the US Civil War, but to make out that things were terrible requires one to overlook how the Industrial Revolution advanced across much of the globe.

So the barbarous relic of a gold-backed currency clearly was able to work in tandem with a massive rise in economic output.

The ECB printing money is an unavoidable collectivism, an inescapable taxation for those whose wealth is unable to escape the Euro gulag.

To paraphrase: how can one beat a Central Bank that buys ink by the barrel?

One thing I realized last night: How much Occupy Wall Street was like the Zombie Apocalypse: a bunch hordes of poorly dressed, smelly, ill kept, rude people roaming around moaning about how much they want to live off the lifeblood of the productive members of society...

The problem of having money backed by nothing is that dweebs such as Peston really seem to think that "resources" can be created out of thin air. Thus, if Italy needs 300 billion euros, just print them up and hey pesto, the job's a good 'un. Deep down somewhere in their reptile brain they must be dimly aware of the barrowloads of cash needed to buy a loaf in Weimar Germany, but if so, they repress it. The Germans still remember of course, and that is probably the only thing keeping the ECB in check from cranking up the printing presses. But the idea that you can print your way out of a financial crisis by producing greater and greater amounts of increasingly worthless money must be some sort of mental illness, and one of the few which seems to be contagious.

Public sector parasites commonly refer to money as 'resources' or 'resource'.

Public sector parasites commonly refer to money as 'resources' or 'resource'.

That comes from years of living in an environment where money simply happens, without any awareness of why.

Our disgrace President(Portugal) - from Socialist Right- said the same. Unlimited .

A week later he said people should increase savings...

Yet they still have the nerve to send counterfeiters to gaol. I wonder what would happen if a counterfeiter ever used the defence that he was simply engaged in quantatitive easing? However, for the time being, it seems that counterfeiting is a state monopoly.

19th century busts were for the same reason that 20th century busts are for.

Banks making loans that are not from real savings - i.e. "crediting to the accounts" of borrowers, rather than transfering money from savers to borrowers. Creating a gap between the "monetary base" (the actual money) and "broad money" (bank credit) - a gap that must collapse, sooner or later (and the later it is - the worse it is).

Bringing in Central Banking (as the Americans did in 1913 and the Canadians did in 1935) does not prevent this - if anything it makes the credit bubbles bigger.

Indeed it is INTENDED to make the credit bubble bigger.

The real Robert Preston!