I was looking at my Quotations folder on my laptop – what earlier generations would have called a Commonplace Book – and saw this entry from a few years ago:
“There is no means of avoiding the final collapse of a boom brought about by credit expansion. The alternative is only whether the crisis should come sooner as the result of voluntary abandonment of further credit expansion, or later as a final and total catastrophe of the currency system involved.” - Ludwig von Mises, Chapter XX: Interest, Credit Expansion, The Trade Cycle, § 8 : The Monetary or Circulation Theory of the Trade Cycle
Earlier this week, I finished The Lords of Easy Money: How the Federal Reserve Broke the American Economy by Christopher Leonard, which had the effect of moving me from uneasy to scared (Seems like that has happened on a number of topics in the last ten years). It helped confirm my suspicions that our economic options range from difficult choices made 8-10 years ago, to very difficult choices now, to plausible catastrophic outcomes in our lifetimes.
A more in-depth review of the book may be forthcoming for this board but suffice it to say I strongly recommend it for anyone here. Well-informed, neither overly long nor dense.
–sutton