This book explains the Federal Reserve and what it’s doing to the economy better than any book I’ve ever read. I’m pretty sure an average middle school kid could read this book and understand it effectively. I wish this book had been written many years earlier, and I wish today, every Economics student, or even every literate American would read this book. As someone with an Economics degree, I am telling you, this book is the real deal and will give you nightmares. The Feds have basically run out of asset bubbles to avoid paying the piper. To get out of the Dot Com Bust, the Feds helped instigate the Housing Bubble and Bust. To get out of the Housing Bust, the Feds purposefully used Quantitative Easing to create an everything bubble. I had come into a little money a few years ago, and I always remembered the tried and true saying, buy low and sell high. But there was nothing priced low. Everything was expensive, stocks, precious metals, housing. Of course, back then, few people knew about or trusted cryptocurrency, and now we even have a Bitcoin bubble. On top of this, the world is increasingly pushing the dollar away with China leading the move, pushing for the ascent of their own currency. When the next bust happens, the Feds will be out of options. Our country faces austerity measures, huge cuts in social spending, hyperinflation, basically what we are forcing upon other countries today. And perhaps we deserve it.
As wonderful and clear this book is, it misses two huge things. While it does mention that the US, unlike any other nation, can keep printing money because it is the world’s dominant trading currency, what is called “exorbitant privilege,” the author can go into this more along with the rise of alternative currencies. Not only are we indebting future generations to the banks and their elite owners, but we are also currently impoverishing other countries.
The second big thing is the why. Why is the Federal Reserve aiding and abetting risk speculation and dumping so much money into the economy? It’s not just about keeping the currency from imploding. It’s all about a massive redistribution of wealth from people who work to people who speculate with money they don’t even earn. The Fed was supposedly created to rein in rogue banks that loaned much more money than they had, creating speculation bubbles. That’s funny, because the Fed has become the very thing they claimed to combat. The Fed has become one huge casino that allows the elite to speculate with money created pretty much from thin air. Once this bubble bursts, everyone pays for it, and in this sense, the creation of money for speculation is one huge wealth redistribution scam. It’s basically like a group of people getting credit at casinos to gamble huge, and so long as the economy is doing well, they keep winning huge, but once the economy hits a snag, they lose huge, but it’s not their money to begin with. They really lose nothing. But then when the casinos ask them to pay off their gambling debts, since they had no money to begin with, the casinos cry that they’re too big to fail, so all the taxpayers wind up paying off these delinquent accounts. What a scam, except they’re not called casinos, they’re called banks.
It’s weird that we’re pretty much replicating 100 years ago, a pandemic followed by an economic boom based on rampant speculation then we’ll see another Great Depression, perhaps followed by World War III as a political tact to stimulate the economy.
thenonexistentbookclub 
I agree with you that Fed has created a bubble out of everything. Bond markets, stock markets, crypto markets all are rallying big time. On top of that, Jerome Powell is pointing at how there has been less than 2% inflation in the US. He is not ready to look at how consumer inflation has been turned into asset-price inflation. One explanation to why so much money printing happens may be because of their pet theory that lower interest means cheap borrowing, hence more spending, which keeps the economy running.
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