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Sept. 18, 2020 - Ron Paul Liberty Report
23:37
The End is Nigh...The Fed's Nonsense Will Soon End

This week the Fed decided that interest rates would remain artificially suppressed at zero, and stay there for years to come! Central planners always end up backing themselves into an impossible corner. The idea that a government-created central bank can plan the economy by price-fixing and counterfeiting currency is proving itself to be impossible.

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Negative Rates, Desperate Economies 00:08:02
Hello everyone and thank you for tuning in today to the Liberty Report.
Dr. Paul is traveling today, so I'll be your host.
My name is Chris Rossini, and this week we'll be covering the Federal Reserve, which is a topic that Dr. Paul and I often cover because it's so critical to our lives.
It's really the engine of the big government that we live under.
So they had a big meeting this week, the Fed chairman, and Powell said that they're going to be keeping interest rates at 0%.
So the Fed obviously is a price fixer because prices are supposed to go up and down with supply and demand.
Price fixing distorts the economy.
It creates bubbles which have to turn into a bust.
But people have long believed that this is necessary, that central planning is a necessary part of the American lifestyle, which anybody that knows their American history knows that that's just not true.
That's, you know, if you're free and you have free markets and you don't have a central planner that tries to fix prices and on top of that, that counterfeits money in an effort to maneuver the world, in this case, like it's some kind of SimCity or chessboard.
It's doomed to fail.
But we're in the middle of it.
We've been in the middle of it for over 100 years now.
So we're going to deal with what we have in front of us as it is.
I have a few quotes that I picked up from what Powell said this week.
He started off by saying, quote, I guess I would say the recovery is continuing.
We would say, no, it's not.
There is no recovery.
Perhaps the stock market is up.
You know, when you print trillions of dollars in a matter of months, it'll have a tendency to raise prices somewhere.
And in this case, we have rising stock prices because everybody's at home because of the coronavirus, which is another debacle.
So the stock market is up.
Yeah, that's true.
But the stock market is not the economy.
When you look around and you see tens of millions unemployed, I see just in my local area the businesses that are gone that are not coming back.
We see in the news, Yelp reported, I believe 60% of businesses are closed for good.
To call a stock market bubble, another bubble, a recovery that is continuing is disingenuous.
It's really just, you know, it's really just said to make people feel good and as a smokescreen.
But then Powell says, quote, we think that the economy is going to need low interest rates, which support economic activity for an extended period of time.
It will be measured in years.
So if there's a recovery, we need zero interest rates and low interest rates, artificially, of course, for years.
That just doesn't add up.
A strong economy wouldn't need that.
So, you know, they're talking out of both sides.
Again, just to put words out there to pacify the public.
But here at the Ron Paul Liberty Report, we're not interested in that.
We're interested in the truth.
So we're going to keep attacking these, you know, these nonsensical things that the central planners say.
And, you know, even before coronavirus, the economy was very weak.
If you watched our show, you know, last year, at the end of last year, it was already due for a major correction.
And there was a time in a past, recent past, where the Fed even tried raising interest rates just a little bit.
And they got to a measly 2%, and everything started falling apart.
That just shows how fragile and weak everything is.
And if you look around the world, you have the European Central Bank that has had negative interest rates.
You have England that is talking about zero rates and negative rates.
Japan talking about negative rates.
This is a worldwide calamity, worldwide weakness.
To think that everybody has to go down to zero rates to prop this up shows how weak it is, not how strong it is.
So that's the situation there.
And it's from a lot of years, 100 years in our case.
Bank of England was around a couple of hundred years before us.
This is a long time of messing with prices, with interest rates, with counterfeiting money.
It's a big edifice that has been built up.
And as with all central planning, you ultimately paint yourself into a corner.
You ultimately get to a point where it's checkmate, where no matter what you do, it's the wrong move.
No matter what you do, a collapse happens.
And we're approaching that.
And it looks that way.
You could feel the desperation in the fact that everybody believes that you have to have negative interest rates to keep their economies going.
Powell also stressed that government is going to have to keep spending.
We in America have the biggest debt in the world.
We're closing in on $27 trillion that the government owes.
It's insane.
Nobody could wrap their heads around that kind of number.
And everybody knows it.
But as long as they can keep kicking the can down the road, they're going to keep doing it.
And government spending is a net negative.
It misallocates resources in the economy.
It suffocates real entrepreneurs who have to survey the economy and all the resources that they're going to put together to satisfy real desires from customers.
When government spends money, there is no profit and loss.
It's all political.
That's how money is spent.
Votes.
What'll make me look good?
What'll the voters vote me for, vote me in again for?
So government, it's a political entity.
It should never be involved in allocating resources in the economy.
But again, it is in modern times, so we have to deal with it.
But when government pays someone to dig a ditch and another person to fill it in, yeah, they both did a job.
But no wealth was created.
Nobody wanted that.
No consumer says, yes, I will pay you for that, you know, for something in return.
It's busy work, and government is the master of that.
They have millions and millions of employees because you will get paid.
But as far as satisfying all of our wants and needs out here, it's a net negative to us.
So it further erodes our standard of living when you have increases in government spending.
And we've seen, especially under the Trump administration, and not just him, but before him, with Republicans, with Bushes, and Reagan, they're big spenders.
They use rhetoric to get into office that they're for limited government, but that's just to get your vote.
Nobody in Washington is for limited government, not even close.
Rhetoric vs. Reality 00:06:29
There's maybe two people in my mind that I know that are for limited government, but out of everybody that's there, that's it's virtually nothing.
So it's government expanding as it has under the Trump administration and everybody before him is eroding our standard of living on top of what the Fed does, on top of what the governors and the mayors and the cities have done this year.
They've really gotten their pound of flesh out of the American people this year.
It's really horrible.
Here's another quote that I grabbed from Powell, and this one's almost comical.
He says, There's actually enormous economic gains to be had nationwide from people wearing masks and keeping their distance.
I mean, what are people supposed to make out?
This is the chairman of the Federal Reserve talking about enormous economic gains from wearing a mask.
That's pretty bad.
But it's par for the course.
He's pretty much saying what everybody else is saying: wear your mask, wear your mask.
Anybody that watches the Ron Paul Liberty Report, Daniel McAdams and Dr. Paul have shown that the mask has done nothing.
The lockdowns have done nothing.
The virus is going to do what the virus does.
And, you know, and that's exactly what it has done.
But, you know, there's gains to be made from getting people to obey you, wear masks, stay in your house, do this, do that.
You know, there are people that exploit that to their advantage, the authoritarian types.
That's gravy for them.
And that's what 2020 has been all about.
And, you know, when Powell was doing his conference, I was on Twitter looking at some financial people.
And I'll tell you, they're like, this guy doesn't know what he's talking about.
They don't know what they're doing.
This is the worst speaking that they've seen from a Fed chair.
But you know what?
Of course he doesn't know.
Nobody knows.
Nobody could central plan the economy.
How many times has Dr. Paul said that even if he was Fed chair, his first job he would figure out how to get rid of the Federal Reserve, not to try to play this print money, counterfeit trillions of dollars, hand it out, try to manage what's happening over here, what's happening across the world, what's happening in the United States.
It's beyond what the human mind or any group of human minds could possibly achieve.
But they get rich.
Lots of people get rich.
If you're, you know, there's a lot of businesses that love the Fed because they're on the receiving end of crony capitalism.
You know, if you're close to the printing press and you get that money first, you get to go into the economy, spend it, and drive up prices.
And everybody else looks around and there's rising prices.
What's going on?
So that's, you know, there's a lot of people that benefit from this relative to everyone.
It's very small.
But, you know, people get beyond rich in the military-industrial complex, in the pharmacy, pharmacological, industrial complex, you name it.
They get very, very rich.
And they want to see this continue for their own interests.
They don't want to go, they don't want to lower standard of living any more than anyone else.
But the Fed money has to continue off of the printing press in order for that to happen.
And that's why you always see more calls for more government spending, more Federal Reserve counterfeiting.
And that's all that you'll see in the media.
But what ends up happening for the normal people like us is we see a roller coaster economy.
We see constant booms and busts.
You know, when the Fed lowers the interest rates and they print all this money, they create all these economic distortions.
Just in my lifetime, I've seen three big ones.
I remember the NASDAQ bubble in 2000.
I mean, if you think there's a stock market bubble now, back then, those tech stocks were going up $50, $100 a day.
It was unbelievable, and it was every day.
All you had to do was go along, and you're making more money than you could imagine.
And this is not the marketplace.
This is not how markets work.
Markets, sure, you'll have manias here and there, but they'll be localized.
This is general.
This is a general mania that the Fed creates.
And after the 2000 bubble, I remember the housing bubble.
And that was another unbelievable mania where people were buying houses that they didn't even see.
They're in Florida.
They're just flipping them faster than they don't even know what they're buying, but they're just turning over houses.
And what happens every time?
A major, major bust happens every time, where people are then sunk because they don't know what's happening in the grand scheme.
They just see this mania going on.
They think that it's, you know, there's always going to be a greater fool, but there isn't always a greater fool.
Ultimately, somebody's got to be at the top holding the bag.
And that's what the Fed gives us over and over.
And if you want to hear something ironic, when the Fed was created in 1913, they were created to create stability in the marketplace, to create, you know, to protect the value of the dollar.
They've done the exact opposite, which is normally what happens when you hear promises from politicians.
Whatever they're promising you, you could almost always count on the exact opposite.
So instead of giving us economic stability, they give us economic hallucinations followed by very real pain.
The Fed's Economic Hallucinations 00:03:23
And this is why you need sound money in order to have a functional civilization.
I think we're, when I look at the big picture, and I'm far from being a know-it-all, I think we're in the end stages of a very big decaying idea.
And that's that government can plan and be the king of the world, you know, whether it's in your own personal life, whether it's bossing around other countries, whether it's whatever it is, and they could hide behind whether it's scientific and whatever excuses they have.
But it's really when you look at foreign policy, look at what the U.S. Empire, have they brought democracy, rebuilt countries and freedom?
No, they don't do any of that.
In fact, there are endless wars.
Our current president wants to end endless wars, because endless wars means endless money.
So they've done none of that.
They don't go and spread American goodness around the world.
It actually creates animosity towards us when you go in and you tell them you're going to live the way we tell you you're going to live.
When you look at the virus, what has happened?
I mean, what a debacle.
I don't have to go into all the details.
We go into it often enough during the week.
But this ability or this belief that politicians can run things, that government can run other countries, and now the Fed that they can run the economy, run the world by price fixing and counterfeiting.
It's all coming home to roost.
That the answer is, no, you can't.
You just can't.
No matter how much you want it, no matter how much your imagination thinks that you're supposed to, you can't.
It's not the way life works.
You know, there are economic laws, just as there are physical laws, mental laws, spiritual laws that cannot be broken.
And your good intentions, if they are good at the root, don't matter.
You have to play by the rules, which are the economic laws.
And we're often asked, how long can this go?
How long can this madness continue?
And the answer is we don't know any more than Powell knows what interest rates can be.
Life is far too complex.
There are variables that we don't even know about that are in play all the time, let alone all the ones that we know about.
And there are free individuals, billions of them, thinking their own thoughts, making their own choices, making their own decisions, thinking to themselves, I want this instead of that.
I'm willing to pay this instead of that.
I don't like this.
I like that.
This is, you know, we live in a natural world of freedom.
And to think that people that are in this world are capable of managing it and with whatever techniques they think they have, it's just not true.
Global Banking's Collapse 00:05:39
So we're seeing a massive thing come down because this is a global situation.
This isn't a little mom-and-pop operation that the Fed is.
It's global.
And there are other global countries and banks that are involved in keeping it going.
So of course, it's going to take a lot of time.
But you can see the writing on the wall.
You can see that they're cornered, that they don't know what to do with interest rates, that militarily conquering the world doesn't work.
So you can see this stuff, even though you can't see what the future will hold.
And there was a time when communism, there were communist countries, I believe, if my number is right, that 65% of the world at one time was communist.
And look at today, it's nowhere.
Communism is gone.
Yes, China uses communist rhetoric, but it's rhetoric.
That's all, you know.
Here in America, politicians use freedom rhetoric.
It's rhetoric.
They'll say things.
You got to look at the actual actions and what they're actually doing.
And both the United States and China are, you know, they're crony capitalists.
Oftentimes, China has more capitalist aspects than we do here, ironically.
So they're both under this business plus government partnership, which is a terrible system.
But, you know, it's not communism.
And so when the Soviets failed, communism went with it on a global scale.
Everybody knows in this world that that does not work.
They'll use rhetoric, but it's rhetoric.
You know, I'm always reminded of a quote from Lekwalensa, what he said afterwards after the Soviets fell.
And I'd like to read it to you.
He said, quote, I had conversations with all the powerful people in the world, with presidents, with prime ministers, chancellors, and kings too.
None of them believed that there was any chance of us toppling communism before the year 2000.
I didn't meet a single person among those people who would believe that was possible.
Not a single one in the whole world.
So when you're surrounded by something ominous like communism, it was gone before the year 2000, well before it, you know, even though nobody thought it was possible.
Well, today we have a central banking crony capitalist system that dominates the world.
It's ominous.
It's everywhere.
It'll have the same exact fate that communism had.
It's unworkable.
And something, if it's unworkable on a minor scale, is unworkable on a grand scale.
And that's what we're seeing.
That's what we're in the middle of.
Who knows how long it'll last?
Could last well past our lifetimes.
Who knows?
But this is a bigger chain of events, bigger flow of history than our individual lives.
But we can still see it, analyze it, and at least do the best that we can to deal with it.
But when the Soviets fell, everybody around the world knows that communism is a failure.
When central banking fails, whenever that happens to be, everybody hopefully in the whole world will know central banking is a failure.
Price fixing is a failure.
Counterfeiting money is a failure.
So as Dr. Paul has always said, the Fed is going to self-destruct.
We like to say and the Fed, end the Fed, but we're not going to end the Fed.
That's just not how it's going to happen.
The Fed will self-destruct on its own because it will run up against all of the economic laws that every central planner runs up against.
And they'll eventually have to admit that their game is up.
So until that time, or whenever that time happens, we're in the business of ideas.
The Ron Paul Liberty Report is interested in people understanding the ideas of liberty, freedom, voluntary interactions with one another, sound money, no central planning from above, moving people around like they're chess pieces.
And we're not pawns to be moved around.
We're free individuals that we have to make our own way through life.
Yes, it's nice to look for help and think that people are going to help you, but if you're looking for help from politicians, you're looking in the wrong place.
They're politicians.
You got to know who you're dealing with.
So we just hope that whenever central banking does come to its end, that enough people out there will have enough sense to think, you know what, it's time to have sound money.
No counterfeiting.
Nobody should have the ability to counterfeiting.
It's a crime to counterfeit.
Whether an individual person does it, whether a government agency does it, whether a central bank does it, counterfeiting is wrong.
And I believe that it's one of the very few federal crimes that exist, I believe.
So that's the direction we need to move into.
And I'd like to thank everybody today for tuning in to the Liberty Report.
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