Comment Re:It was for a seminar (Score 1) 460
From what you say it seems like you are not aware of the basic mechanism of money creation and think, like most do, that only governments make money. You need to understand that debt and money are fungible, and that all money in our system is created through debt. You need to understand that most money is created by private banks (not the central bank) through the practice of fractional reserve lending, leveraged investments, and other business practices that act to inflate the money supply without corresponding GDP growth. Obviously, banks like to lend as much money as possible at high interest rates, what may not be so clear is why a government would give banks this power? The governments of the world allow banks to have this power because it enables deficit spending by governments, whether for entitlements or for war, without the political fallout of raising taxes or direct inflation.
You will never see the regulation you seek for this reason. Neither big business nor the government is interested in reigning in their excesses. If they were, there would never be a Central Bank in the first place. Central Banks are there to make sure that when bankers get so greedy that they break a market, the government will bail them out. In return, the government gets to secretly tax people through inflation and deficit spend without political fallout.
Over the last 2 decades, at the behest of financial interests, our politicians quietly removed the last vestiges of protections instituted after the 1929 Crash. Over the same period, we have seen the most largest and most rapid increase in money supply in US history. Here are some of the most important deregulations. Please note that these measures pass with overwhelming support from both sides and during presidential terms from both parties.
Fractional Reserve requirements had been steadily lowered for years, until by 1995, there were was no reserve requirement on most money.
After 2 decades of intense lobbying by banks, in 1999, the Gramm-Leach-Bliley act revoked parts of the Glass-Steagal act, allowing investment banks to act as commercial banks thereby enabling the CDO/MBS disaster that happened only 8 years later.
In 2004 the regulations on brokerages limiting them to "only" 12x were lifted to up to 50x! For comparison, individuals are only allowed 4x leverage.
I am not sure about why you keep bringing up floating exchange rates, artificial pegs, trade deficits, Bretton Woods, etc. You are missing the forest for the trees. China did not do anything to us. We did it to ourselves by allowing our GDP to be offshored around the world so a bunch of rich dudes could get richer at the expense of everyone else. The US has spent the last 20 years falling in love with pure finance at the expense of all real-GDP-increasing activities. Everyone thought their tech stocks and houses were "appreciating" and making them rich, when it was only an instance of compartmentalized inflation that our government is now actively bleeding into the real economy to the tune of doubling the M0 Monetary Base in a month. Doubled. in. one. month.
If governments never printed a cent, inflation would still be caused by allowing banks to lend at fractional reserve. Without central banks, they can only go about 10-20 years before they get too greedy and blow up. With central banks, stupid and greedy banks are not allowed to fail on a large scale. The Fed bails them out, making temporary inflation permanent. Of course, governments do spend, so the problem is worse. Due to the mechanism used, more money than the last time is always be needed to fix the next problem. It is essentially a ponzi scheme that has taken nearly 100 years to get to the point where we are hitting the knee of the curve. This is the first breath of hyperinflation. The worst is still a few years away, but not many.