Some might disagree with my view that the U.S. is a centrally-planned economy (and thus, non-capitalist; more of a social-fascist economy). But it is. A central planning board carefully rigs the three most important features of a large economy: its interest rates, its money supply, and the practices of its financial markets and banks.
Of course, that doesn’t mean our economy always co-operates with our brave central planners. And it doesn’t necessarily mean that our planners even have a clue. This chart (via ZH) shows some of their cluelessness:
It tells a story like this:
- In 2009, they
thoughtpublicly forecast that they’d have interest rates back to normal by 2011. - In 2010, they publicly forecast that they’d be rigging up some normal rates by 2012.
- And so on, with each new year. Today, they forecast having normal rates by 2016-17.
These are some of the very people (*cough* Janet Yellen) who had no clue that the 2008 Global Financial Crisis was coming.
As to the economy: If it were recovering (for real) all these years, interest rates would indeed have been back to normal by 2010-11. But our economy hasn’t been recovering much, all these years. Just the markets. (Oh, wait.)
And in the meantime, we have people who think that paying less than the interest rate on a student loan is “paying faithfully” and want their student loan to be at the same rate that banks pay, forgetting, of course, that banks borrow millions at a shot, not tens of thousands, which is 1/1000th the size, and therefore the overhead in handling the loan is that much higher. Somehow, their inability to get a decent paying job with a B.A. in Gay Studies is the fault of the bank.
A “B.A. in Gay Studies”, wasn’t that what we called drunken frat parties when I went to College?
One place that could use some die verse city is the FED. The founding fathers, Lincoln and Napoleon where all enemies of central banking.
Steve – The “die verse city” thing that you use, what does it mean? It looks like you have a bad spellchecker, or an automated software block on the real word “diversity”, or something.