I just finished reading David Stockman's 700+ page tome The Great Deformation: The Corruption of Capitalism in America. It is really hard hitting. Here is the prior budget director under president Reagan, a true insider with legitimate Wall Street insider stripes who has written a thoroughly referenced scholarly work on the US financial system and economy. The book is dense with facts yet well written and it reads smoothly. However, this is a thinking man's book on the subject, assuming the reader has basic familiarity of the FED, the monetary system, fractional reserve banking, hedge funds, derivatives, the large Wall Street banks and the mechanics of the federal government. Here are his essential conclusions, hard hitting and blunt in most cases:
1. The FED has destroyed the free market. Keynesianism is a crackpot intellectually bankrupt theory that a detached committee of "academics" at the FED has applied to the US with disastrous results. Over and over again, Stockman utterly destroys the FED with facts and figures.
2. The destruction of the US economy started with WWI and the FED charter, leading to the first major damage to the gold-backed dollar by FDR in 1932. All of the sequence of events leading up to the gold seizure and dollar devaluation are documented.
3. FDR's New Deal, which Stockman proves had absolutely no salutary effects on the Great Depression, succeeded in planting the seeds of the social welfare state which now is destroying the US economy.
4. Events leading up to Nixon's closure of the gold window in 1972 are explained, especially the roles of the Vietnam War and Johnson's Great Society in fatally wounding the Bretton Woods gold exchange standard. Nixon's act was the coup de grace for the US dollar.
5. The broken US economy has compelled to FED to engage in endless monetizations, market interventions and ultimately outright cartel-like coordination with Wall Street Banks and Hedge funds. The FED is now captive to the interests of Wall Street and the 0.01% elite superwealthy.
6. The S&P 500, Russell 2000 and other stock indices are worthless, manipulated numbers which have completely disconnected from the real Main Street economy. The MSM is a propaganda arm of the rich and powerful who promulgate the deception that the stock indices indicate a healthy economy. They do not.
7. There is no recovery since 2008 and there will not be one. In fact, the US economy is in accelerating disintegration, a structural failure whose solution is far beyond any political or fiscal strategies.
8. The interest rate oppression by the FED has forced savers out of previously safe cash accounts into speculative investments in search of yield. But the financial markets are now completely in the thrall of hedge funds and the Wall Street banks/brokers and the small investor has no chance of surviving in this market. Stockman doesn't say it outright, but the logical conclusion is that the only safe place for cash to run to is literally physical gold and silver held outside the banking system. In other words, savings accounts are a guaranteed loser (no yield, inflationary destruction of value, bail-ins risk), stocks are controlled by hedgies and algorithms and market fundamentals are meaningless, and the bond market is hanging at the edge of the abyss.
9. The best the US economy can hope for is decades of virtually no growth, high taxes, a stagnant standard of living and high unemployment because of the massive debt overhang at the federal, corporate, public and private citizen levels. Keynesianism has destroyed the productive economy and is all but burnt out - all that remains is for the majority of Americans to come to realize this.
There is much much more in this fabulous book. I recommend it highly. Stockman has confirmed what fringe analysts like Willie have been predicting for over a decade: markets are hopelessly corrupt, the dollar is a dead currency walking, the the US economy is in terminal breakdown. After reading this, I am more convinced than ever of the wisdom of holding physical gold and silver, despite the anomalous price action of the last 2 years. Stockman has pulled the curtain up on our corrupt system and the level and breadth of market manipulation is breathtaking, more than the worst nightmares of a conspiracy theorist. We are headed for a major economic shit storm - very soon.
http://www.amazon.com/The-Great-Defo.../dp/1586489127