Repeated process

Professor Baradaran lays the problem to what she calls an “ideological coup” that has “quietly transformed our society over the last 50 years, raising the fortunes of the financial economy — and its agents like private equity firms — at the expense of the real economy experienced by most Americans.” The roots of the “intellectual takeover,” she reckons, lie in a “backlash against socialism in Cold War Europe.”
Our purpose here is not to dispute with Ms. Baradaran over the problem. It is merely to point out that an intellectual backlash against socialism is not the only thing that occurred in the last 50 years. For there was another ideological coup, and precisely 50 years ago. That would be the abandonment of the Bretton Woods monetary system that was set up in the closing days of World War II and undergirded the post-war recovery.
The collapse of Bretton Woods burst on the world scene with the so-called Nixon Shock. That was American’s decision to close the window at the Treasury Department. That “window” was where, under the Bretton Woods Agreement, foreign governments were supposed to be able to cash in their dollars for a 35th of an ounce of gold. Nixon closed it in August 1971. Within a few years, Congress formally launched the age of fiat money.

Not the first time, nor the last.  But at least we have economists looking at the full cycles.  The goal this time is same as last, try to separate the central banker from Congress, a little better. The secondary goal is to get more economists to connect up the longer cycles and discover this is a repeated pattern.

This is not a future debt crisis, the debt rebellion is here to stay. We be antificated.