 First question, yes, stand up and ask your question. So in Austrian business cycle theory, it says that the central bank causes the boom by inflating lowering interest rates and like Pavlovian dogs, we go out. So spend, business managers invest, bankers lend, and so here we are in quantitative easing number N to infinity and beyond. And is this the boom that we're going to get out of it, or is that massive pile of money in excess reserve some kind of evidence that there is animal spirits as Keynes himself put that's holding this back? I mean, there are a lot of excess reserves in the banking system, but there has been a rapid run up in the money supply, both M2 and MZM, two of the official Fed measurements. So you certainly see a boom in commodities and you're going to see something, it intensify in the future. And at some point, I mean, this talk at the Fed may withdraw that 0.25 percent interest that they're paying on unused reserves, so that will flood the economy even more with reserves. And just one point, the Austrian business cycle doesn't say that the central bank lowers interest rates. I mean, central bank doesn't control interest rates. What it does do is create reserves out of thin air and in the process of lending them out, there's an excess supply of excess reserves on the market and interest rates fall as a result of that. My take is that we've really, we've done this for so long that I think the ability of the government to create an artificial boom has been diminished. It now requires so much stimulus, because we're so addicted to it, and the bigger the economy gets, at least or the phony economy, the more stimulus that you need to give it another shot. It's just like any other addiction. I guess you build up a tolerance, and if you're a drug addict and if you keep taking the same drug, you need more and more of it. I mean, if you look at how muted the phony recovery we got as a result of the bailouts this time, we had record amounts of stimulus. We had more stimulus under Bernanke than we had under Greenspan, yet we barely moved the needle. I mean, we didn't even get the unemployment rate to come below 8 percent. In fact, it's really 15 percent. Economic growth, the GDP numbers couldn't even really pierce two for very long, and we're already on the cusp of another recession. I mean, the Fed knew that if it didn't come up with even more stimulus, we would be back in recession, but now, since the problem is so much bigger, the debt is so much larger, you need that much of a dose. And again, you get a smaller and smaller reaction, and I think we're at the point of overdose. I'm at the point where we're going to die from all this stimulus. It's just not going to work anymore. The world's not going to hold our paper, and it's just that we've reached the end of the road. I mean, I don't know how many feet we got left, but I think it falls apart within the next several years, maybe within the next several months. I mean, you can't pinpoint these things, but I think the world is going through these sovereign debt crises, and we're probably next on the list. Well, and I think you can make a case that another bubble's been created. All the time we talk about record number of people on food stamps, while we've had unemployment rates from 10 to maybe down to eight, the real economy hadn't done anything. Stock market's more than doubled since March of 2009. Junk bond funds have record inflows. House prices, as Peter mentioned in his speech, have not been allowed to correct for a number of reasons, both low mortgage interest rates and a foreclosure tangle legally that has not allowed 16 million homes to come on the market that normally would. So I would contend that there's almost been a mini bubble while we've been in this extended recession, and it's going to be a matter of time. And not to mention probably the biggest bubble in world history, and that would be the government bond bubble. So it's just a matter of time before that all cracks up. What pops that bubble in an Austrian sense, I don't know what it'll be, but this has been bubble after bubble after bubble. For mainstream economists, the boom is good and the bust is bad. For Austrian economists, it's just about the reverse. The boom is bad because it's misallocating resources and the bust is good because it's reallocating resources, liquidating investments that never should have been made in the higher orders or the earlier orders of production. The problem that I think both Peters especially is stressed and others of us also mentioned is that what we're now doing is keeping, it's too big to fail, Detroit should have been busted, the financial sector should have been busted in the bust, and we're not allowing it to go. So we're just continuing the process of the bust and it's not being solved, it's just continuing and continuing and continuing. Next question. Hi, Sam Baker, I work with Transnational Research in New Jersey. My question has to do with the issue of what potentially replaces a central bank, federal reserve system if we do have a crack up and the idea of sound money and market money where you don't have a government monopoly. I'm wondering is such a system realistic or is this just an idealized concept that we can think about but could never be implemented in practice? I mean by that, by actually private companies producing money or banks producing their own currencies and having that system work in such a incredibly sophisticated time. All right, I'll take this but if I screw it up badly, I got Joe waiting in reserve here, whom I just volunteered for this. He smiles nervously as I say that. Well, the Austrian view of money is that it always emerges on the market to begin with, so it's not like we're imagining some scenario that some wild speculation that could never occur in reality. Money always emerges originally on the market because the money that's chosen, the thing that's chosen is the most highly marketable or saleable commodity. For other reasons, people like gold for whatever reason, whatever the thing happens to be and that becomes the most saleable commodity. Now the paper money that the government issues is not a saleable commodity period, so it couldn't possibly be the most marketable commodity. So it couldn't come about in this way whereby through barter gradually a common medium of exchange emerges. No one would ever, it would never come out that way because no one has any previous use value for pieces of paper with politicians on them. So they could not emerge that way. So the money emerges on the market out of the barter system. And there are other reasons too it couldn't emerge that what we have now, the government version of money couldn't emerge because you couldn't do any reckoning with paper money that was just forced on you out of nothing. Gold that comes out of a barter system brings with it a previously existing array of barter prices. You remember that one unit of gold bought you ten hats and five pounds of bananas and whatever, and so you've got, you know what it's worth. But if I just say here are five woodses, now go use them in exchange, how would you know? Is five woodses worth a fur coat? Is it worth a gumball? You wouldn't know, you couldn't use it. So it has to emerge this way. Now when we realize that, then suddenly it doesn't seem like something out of Mars to suggest that it's possible to imagine a monetary system without the government involved in it because the government is the latecomer in the process. The government will then come along and with a beautiful contribution of what has government done to our money by Murray Rothbard is that in a short little book, he goes through step by step exactly how the government takes this and then first it'll, you know, it monopolizes the mint or it gives the money a particular national name. So you begin to think of it as really a dollar rather than as a unit of gold and little by little, then it will finally take the gold backing away. It's this whole process. What we sort of want to do is reverse that process. Just take these steps back. Now whether that's possible to do politically is a separate question. But theoretically there's nothing wrong with this model. Yeah, I like to turn that kind of question around a little bit and suggest that everything we know, both from economic theory and from history, is the belief that we could have a government controlled fiat paper money standard that would be managed in a way that gives us economic prosperity. That is completely naive. It's fanciful. It's pie in the sky. It's unrealistic. Instead, the view that given the gold standard isn't perfect. There are resource costs and so on, as was mentioned by Tom. But these are trivial compared to the costs of a fiat system. In other words, the reasonable, balanced, comparative, middle of the road, sensible kind of monetary system is a commodity standard that is controlled by the market with the absence of government interference. I have to disagree with Tom Woods in a very limited sense. Murray used the same example. He said, who would take 10 Rothbard's? And I used to raise my hand and said, I'll take them. I'll take them. I tell you, if I had 10 Rothbard's right now, they'd be worth thousands of dollars. And one day, if you're lucky enough to get 10 Woods's out of Tom on a piece of paper, it'll be worth thousands of dollars. But obviously, I agree with the substance of what Tom was saying. I just had to add that in. I interpreted this question a little bit differently. The way I interpreted it was not how the money would work, but how would banking work. And the way I would see how banking would work is there'd be two kinds of banks, or each bank would have two kinds of businesses. One would be demand deposits. So you deposit a demand deposit of $100 in the bank, and it just keeps it. It doesn't lend it out to anyone else. It's somebody during the break was saying, how would you like a fractional reserve parking lot where they use your car when you're not using it? Okay, so one thing would be a demand deposit, and they just keep it. The other would be a time deposit. And here, what Joe Salero said is actually perfectly correct. Namely, you would have this time dimension. In other words, if somebody wants to lend the bank a time deposit for one year, well, then you find someone who wants to borrow it for one year, so the bank is sort of an intermediary, sort of a tailor. I mean, a tailor cuts cloth to suit or makes a big cloth out of small cloth. So what the time deposit bank would be is just a tailor to tailor borrowers and lenders. And there, it wouldn't be a demand deposit. You just can't come back to the bank and say, I want my money now, because you lend it to them for six years or 20 years of whatever it was in the case of a mortgage. Next question? Next question? Yes, Brian Greenberg, WNJC Radio in New Jersey. Peter was a guest on my show during his quest for a Senate in Connecticut. Unfortunately, I couldn't get my listeners to vote for you due to voter ID, but we did support you. Anyway, I want to talk about the $64 trillion derivative question. Two part. One is, how does that impact in what's coming down the pike? And two, in the Dodd-Frank bill, I understand there are regulations that are going to require the big banks to increase their collateral on the next year, which will require them to buy US treasuries, which I sense will create more demand for treasuries. How does that play into your scenario? Well, first of all, I mean, more regulation is the last thing that the financial service industry needs. I mean, I run a regulated broker-dealer and asset management firm, and my regulatory cost of Skyrock at it over the last decade, including during the years where the housing bubble was inflating. So the problem in finance is too much government, not too little. And Dodd-Frank is not going to prevent the next crisis from happening. It's gonna happen anyway. In fact, maybe Dodd-Frank only makes the next crisis worse. In fact, I think really it codifies too big to fail. I mean, all the too big to fail banks are now much, much bigger than they were before we labeled them too big to fail. And in fact, that's why they got bigger. It's the moral hazard. I mean, banks that should have failed now grew instead, and banks that should have grown and attracted deposits maybe without a business. And maybe they ended up getting bought up by the too big to fail banks because they couldn't compete. And so it's kind of like a reverse Darwinism where we get the survival of the unfittest because it's the unfit they get the government guarantees and now the more solvent banks can't compete because they're not on a level of footing anymore. Who's gonna put money in a bank that's too small that could fail? I wanna put my money in the bank that can't fail, right? And so, but the banks that can't fail, they're ones that are have the worst balance sheets, the ones that are making the worst loans. So that's not going to stop the next crisis at all. And as far as, are there any mandates in there that banks buy treasuries? I know a lot of banks are buying treasuries. I mean, a lot of the regulators are looking at their collateral and a lot of them, they have no choice, but to buy treasuries. And the way it works is they borrow the money from the Fed and they loan it back to the treasury and they make the spread and they lever themselves up. And when people say, well, the banks aren't lending any money, surely are, they're lending it all to the government. It's crowding out and the government just blows the money. It doesn't go into increasing our productive capacity. And so small businesses can't get credit. I mean, big corporations, they can access the bond market or the bank, they can go to the discount window. But when they get money, they don't use it productively. They just gamble with it. They speculate with it. And as far as your first question on derivatives, I mean, the problem with derivatives is all the counterparty risk. And that so many people are buying insurance and the counterparty is not gonna be able to pay when the policies are cashed in. That's what happened with the credit default swap. That's what happened. A lot of people that were buying these mortgages, well, they just bought insurance. So they thought they hadn't covered, but they didn't bother to look at the insurance company. How they gonna pay? The idea is that, well, the insurance company just assumed that the mortgages wouldn't default. So it was great business, right? You collect money, you sell an insurance and you think no one's ever gonna put in a claim. So the problem with derivatives is the counterparty. And I think that is gonna happen. I think that there's probably a lot of derivatives in the bond market. I think a lot of people in bonds think they have their positions hedged. Well, what happens when the other side of the transaction has all these claims that doesn't have the capital to pay. And you probably have a lot of portfolios. A lot of people have insurance. So there is tremendous counterparty risk. It's there. It's all part of the problem. And if the government wasn't there with the moral hazard and the Bernanke put, we wouldn't have these risks. People would be more worried, but no one cares now. Everybody figures the government has their back. So this crisis is coming. And I don't think it necessarily starts in derivatives, but the derivatives will exacerbate it as it unfolds. Thanks. Just a follow up to that question on the derivatives market and a subsequent related point. There's definitely a shortage of collateral in the markets when you have a blowing out of credit spreads and the acceptable collateral in the derivatives markets are treasuries and cash, right? So what we saw in 2008 was in part a knee-jerk reaction of buying of treasuries to satisfy exactly what you're talking about, which is the counterparty risk. That hasn't been solved. But secondarily, when you look at the forecast that interest rates are gonna go up, leaving aside the derivatives question, the Fed itself is levered 51 to one with a duration of eight. If interest rates go up even a little bit, the Fed becomes insolvent. How do you think structurally they can let interest rates go up? Well, one of the interesting things that was done recently at the Fed is they had a change in the law. And basically the Fed put the treasury on the hook for any losses. So basically when interest rates go up and all these 30-year mortgages and bonds that the Fed is holding collapse, the treasury has to reimburse the Fed. But of course, where are they gonna get the money? Well, I guess they'll get it for the Fed. So the whole thing is just a shell game to hide the fact that there's absolutely nothing behind our money. It's all a big Ponzi scheme. But that's also why the Fed can never shrink their balance sheet. The Fed keeps saying we can shrink the balance sheet. In fact, in Ben Bernanke's press conference, Ben Bernanke denied that when the Fed prints money and buys bonds, it's the same thing as it's spending. He said, it's all like spending because we're not buying stuff, we're buying bonds. Well, you're still spending, you're buying something, you're spending. But the fact that they choose to buy bonds doesn't mean they're not spending. But then Bernanke said, because whatever we buy, we're gonna turn around and sell. To who? I mean, you need a buyer, the Fed's the only buyer, who else would be dumb enough to buy? I mean, the Fed doesn't care because it just creates the money. The Fed is, it's an illusion that there's an exit strategy. There is no exit strategy, they just have to buy forever. Because the minute they stop buying, the price of what they buy is gonna implode, right? And then that's it. And then they have these huge losses. That's why the balance sheet has to grow and grow and grow. Especially when you figure, look at all the mortgages. What are they buying now? They're gonna buy mortgages. Who's gonna want those mortgages? Nobody's gonna want them. Because the minute the Fed stops buying them, the real estate prices are gonna fall and the mortgages are worthless. And then of course, they're at super low rates. Who's gonna want these low mortgage rates when mortgages would interest price go? So the whole thing is just this gigantic shell game and people hope that we don't notice what's going on. And when they write the history books about this period of time, I mean, elementary school kids are gonna look back on disbelief. Like how can people have been so stupid? It's almost like if somebody wrote a fiction novel about this, nobody would believe it, right? Who could believe that this could happen? Yeah, I wanted to paint a little picture to ask a question. So in the context that I have a question about banking reform and with well over half the world's assets held in offshore entities and offshore zero tax jurisdictions and things. And with the like in US to start a bank you need a hundred million dollars and jump through all these hoops. And there's a lot of regulations like you guys are talking about, but you could go to a little island and start a bank with a million dollars. And often times you see these banks create all these derivative complex products like in their offshore branches. So my question is how do you approach banking reform in that kind of environment of the world financial system as it is like that? I think the core problems I said was fractional reserve banking. Who cares if people take risks and come up with these financial innovations that may or may not be viable on the market? If you don't have fractional reserve banking involved the collapse and losses that will result from taking these bad and prudent risks and so on won't affect the money supply. In other words, you'll have demand deposits that are fully backed. The people that will get involved in these types of financial innovations will be people that are pretty savvy with no bailout guarantee from the Fed, with no Fed, you will have a situation where it's simply market driven and you'll weed out those investments that are non-viable. This is for Professor Block. You said that increased inflation of money supply would result in more unemployment. But as far as I can see because all the jobs which currently do not exist because all the unemployment caused by the minimum wage laws, wouldn't they clear up if you increase the money supply? If you have inflation, wouldn't there be more jobs at least in short run, which were earlier not feasible because of minimum wage laws? Because minimum wage laws remain as they are. Wouldn't increasing money supply result in more employment? Well, yes, I think if I said the opposite, I must have misspoke. Certainly during the boom times, we get more employment. We get less leisure and more employment. We get more productivity. The problem is that it's not sustainable. It's not in the right places. With a lower interest rate than the optimal or the market or the original interest rate, we get investments in heavy industry that are not justified by the saving and savings decisions of the people. So if I said that, I misspoke, I apologize for it. Certainly there'll be more jobs. But as Henry Hazlitt is always telling us, we don't want more jobs. What we want is more productivity. Jobs are a pain in the neck. Jobs are a cost. We waste labor resources on jobs. The ideal situation, someone was talking about post-scarcity. I forget who was talking about that, but the ideal situation is to have no scarcity and no jobs and just have stuff like you want a 16-ounce drink, take that Mayer Bloomberg, and it just starts dripping in the amount. So I think I agree with you and certainly I agree with you about the minimum wage law. The reductio there is if it's such a great thing, why don't we raise it a bit, a thousand an hour or something, and then only Peter Schiff will be employed. No, Walter, if I'm understanding the question correctly, what I think he means is that given that the minimum wage is not a market phenomenon, it's a statutory thing and all employers have to abide by it, is there one silver lining to inflation, namely that given that the minimum wage is expressed in dollar terms, if we create all this money, then it's like having no minimum wage anymore. And wouldn't that at least, this would create real jobs that we would want to create. Obviously, there'd be other problems. I think that's... I remember once having a little debate with my professor at Columbia at the time, Gary Becker, and Gary Becker was saying one of the benefits of inflation is that it reduces the real value of the minimum wage. And I said, yes, yes, you're right, but can't we do better than that? Namely, can't we get rid of the minimum wage? And then I started saying, well, we ought to put people in jail who are responsible for passing the minimum wage in the first place. And then he started looking at me as if I was a little weird, but I was under the influence of Murray Rothbard, so that was my... Yeah, whenever you have a surplus of anything, it means the price is too high, right? I mean, you have a lot of people who can't find jobs because the price is too high. Nobody wants to buy their labor. And one of the reasons for that is the minimum wage. But of course, it's not just the minimum wage because that's not all you have to pay when you hire somebody. You gotta pay payroll taxes, workman's comp. You also take on other legal liabilities like maybe your employee is gonna sue you if they're not happy one day because maybe they don't feel they have the right work environment or maybe somebody made an off-color comment and they took offense to it or maybe you just have to fire them and then they wanna sue you because they claim. So there's a lot of risks associated with hiring people beyond what you actually pay the worker. But yeah, I mean, people look at this idea, the Phillips Curve, that there's some kind of trade-off between inflation and unemployment. There's not, but since wages because of government regulations tend to be sticky coming down and they don't adjust going down when there's a surplus of unemployed people that you can lower wages by creating inflation and it's not the inflation that creates the jobs, it's the fact that the price of labor is coming down and it's lower wages. Now of course, employees, I mean, they're not complete idiots so if the cost of living is going up they're gonna want more money. They're not just gonna, but when you have a minimum wage where you have a statutory minimum, then yes, you do end up reducing the minimum wage but it's not gonna create employment in the United States even if the minimum wage were to come down and the reason is because the cost of employment for other reasons is going up much faster because of new regulations and new taxes and health care and things like that. So the cost of becoming an employer is rising and just because you can get the employee a little bit cheaper doesn't mean that your labor costs are actually falling, your labor costs are actually rising and you also have to compete with the government benefits and even if the minimum wage is lower, will somebody take the job if they have a better deal from the government because they're not gonna make them do anything for the money, they just collect it and so maybe you can hire somebody off the books but I guess if you're hiring me off the books then the minimum wage probably doesn't matter if it's all cash under the table but what's more likely gonna happen is that they're gonna end up raising the minimum wage. You know, oh, there's a lot of inflation, we gotta raise the minimum wage and so they'll end up doing that but yeah, it's amazing that people can look at this massive amount of unemployment and not figure out that it means that the price of labor is too high and I got this argument on my radio show with some left-wing labor guy trying to say about the teacher strike that we need higher wages and I tried to put him in a position of an employee, of an employer because he's probably never hired anybody but I said, look, where do you get your haircut? Do you do it yourself or do you go to a barber? He said, well, I go to a barber. I said, okay, what do you pay for a haircut? He said, $15, all right, what if the barber wants to raise his price to $50? A haircut, are you gonna stay there? Or are you gonna go someplace else? I said, because you're employing him to cut your hair and he tried to say, well, I'm not really his employer, I'm his customer, well, you're hiring, when I buy my employee's labor, I'm the customer, they're selling me labor. If they wanna charge too much, I'm not gonna pay them. He was like, well, you should just pay whatever the union wants. Well, he's trying to get $15 haircuts. He wants to pay less, he wants a cheap haircut. He's not, if his barber raised the price to $50, he'd fire him. Just a small footnote to that. This very kind of argument was offered by John Maynard Keynes in the general theory, part of his reasoning that market participants are generally not clever enough to understand the difference between nominal prices and wages and real prices and wages. Keynes said in a period of high unemployment, if it would improve the labor market, not just for minimum wage workers, but for all types of, other types of labor too, to have real wages go down, but yet unions will not agree to nominal wage cuts, then you just inflate the problem away. We effectively reduce real wages through inflation and somehow the unions are not able to see through this and we'll perfectly go along with this inflation. Same thing with the minimum wage. I mean, of course, interest groups would lobby for an increase in the minimum wage and it wouldn't be long before it would keep up with inflation. One more thing I didn't mention too is, labor is not the only cost the business have. You create inflation, your raw material costs go up. Ultimately, if there's more inflation, the cost of capital goes up. A lot of American companies that maybe make things, they import all the components. All your important components cost more money. So inflation can actually undermine the competitors. There's a business. In fact, there are probably a lot of businesses that say, look, I'd like to hire more people, my fuel bills are too high, I can't afford it. All right, one more thing on this, I'm sorry, I just can't resist, but on the wages being too sticky downward thing, like let's say there's suddenly a surge in demand to hold money, so now prices and wages are gonna have to go downward to adjust, but they don't come downward effectively enough or fast enough in the labor market, and so supposedly would just be stuck there forever with unemployment, but there is one way to solve that is you could fire these people and then just rehire them at the lower wage, instead of trying to get it down, just drop it to zero and then rehire them. All right, anyway. Thanks to all of you who came to the conference today. Thanks to our wonderful donors, thanks to our wonderful speakers, and we hope to be back in New York again, so thank you.