Depressions and Their Solution

This is a simple outline of what depressions are and how they are solved. The problem and its solution are simple and should be understood by every voter. It may take a little effort, but the answers are available to us all.

(1) The market, if left free of government intervention and other forms of fraud and misappropriation, is immune to serious economic downturns (Say’s Law). There will always be individual business failures, but the misfortune of one person in the free market is another person’s opportunity. The same amount of material wealth in the economy remains the same; there is just a change of ownership. Because of this balancing of fortunes and the fact that the total wealth of the economy remains the same, there should never be epidemics of business failures.

(2) Business failures reach epidemic proportions because there is a change in the money supply. A reduction in the money supply, referred to as deflation, means that there are insufficient funds to maintain the demand for goods and services at existing prices. This change in demand reduces trading and creates employment. This is the essence of a depression. There is the same amount of wealth in terms of real goods and services but there is not enough money to purchase them.

(3) All that needs to be done to prevent depressions is provide a money supply that cannot be reduced. If the money supply were stable, there will still be goods on the market that are overpriced, causing business failures, but the money of the economy would be directed to cheaper alternatives. These cheaper alternatives would provide new business opportunities to offset the losses, preventing business failures from reaching the epidemic proportions that are characteristic of depressions.

(4) Durable commodities, such as gold, do not disappear and therefore can serve as a money supply that would prevent depressions from happening. In turn, government issued money can be made stable and can also serve an economy that is depression-free. Even if a government caused inflation through deficit spending, it would not necessarily lead to a depression, since the government’s money would still not disappear and thereby lead to the reduction of money that would cause a depression. This inflation would cause a misallocation of the economy’s resources and reduce its overall productivity but it would not lead to the unemployment that is caused by a reduction in the money supply.

(5) However, the US government, along with the other governments of the industrial world, cannot provide us with a money supply that is invulnerable to depression-causing deflation. Why? Because governments have no control over the creation of most of the money in their own economies – banks do. To see how this is done, please read the previous post to this blog “Our Money is Not Real” below. Through fractional-reserve banking, banks are allowed to multiply the government issued money up to six times through issuing credit on money that they do not really possess. This money exists on paper only and can disappear with the application of more paperwork. When our banks contract their credit (reduce the loans outstanding), the money supply of the nation is reduced and a depression results.

(6) The fractional-reserve banking is solely responsible for our recessions and depressions and it is nothing more than a form of fraud that our governments allow bankers to perform upon the rest of the economy. It is supported legally through transparent legal fictions that actually contradict each other and make no sense. The primary fiction is that bank deposits are not really deposits, but rather, are loans. But if this is the case, then the depositor commits fraud every time he writes a check on money that he has already loaned to his banker. An accessory to the depositor’s fraud is the banker who honors the check even though he has already borrowed the money and loaned it to another customer.

(7) Depressions can be brought to an end if the lawyers and judges of our country consistently apply the laws of fraud to the bankers who duplicate and triplicate our money during boom times and then reduce that money to vapor when they contract that credit.