Can You Cure An Addict By Giving Him More Drugs?

Only if you want to kill him. Car­o­line Baum dis­cusses this very topic on Bloomberg. Imag­ine a doc­tor who, faced with an alco­holic, diag­nosed more alco­hol as a treat­ment. A doc­tor like that would be thrown out of the med­ical pro­fes­sion and right­fully so. Yet, our polit­i­cal lead­ers, when faced by a cri­sis cre­ated by years of easy money and debt, are pre­scrib­ing that the cure will come from more debt and easy money. The mar­ket is nat­u­rally going through a cor­rec­tion caused and yet our polit­i­cal lead­ers act as if we have a god given right to never expe­ri­ence a reces­sion or downturn.

Our years of prof­li­gate spend­ing at both a gov­ern­men­tal and indi­vid­ual level has come home to haunt us and the only fix is a painful return to thrift and sav­ing. Instead, our lead­ers are try­ing to lower mort­gage rates so that peo­ple can keep buy­ing houses which only serves to arti­fi­cially inflate prices. They are attempt­ing to force banks to lend to peo­ple so that we can go on buy­ing things we can’t afford. They are flood­ing the mar­ket with money in an attempt to get the econ­omy going again but this can only delay the inevitable and make it much, much worse when we finally have to go through some real day of reckoning.

I think once all this cheap money the gov­ern­ment is cre­at­ing hits the mar­ket, we’re going to see some very seri­ous infla­tion fol­lowed by a crash much worse than what we have expe­ri­enced this year. It’s sad that we don’t have enough seri­ous lead­ers to step up to the plate and say that we had our cake and ate it for far too long and now is the time to pay the piper. Instead, we’re only pro­long­ing the inevitable.

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