 Many Americans have recently become aware of the tremendous role that the Federal Reserve plays in engineering the booms and busts, i.e. the recessions and the periods of general prosperity in America. And the most recent example that we're still suffering under, of course, is the tremendous crash of 2008, precipitated by the Lehman Brothers bankruptcy. We also saw a crash in housing around the same time period. And of course, there's older examples. You only have to go back to 2000-2001 to see the tech stock bubble and subsequent crash. But what's new is that more people are now starting to understand the role that monetary policy played in these booms and subsequent crashes. And I think what's great about this is that the Austrian school has finally received some credit for Austrian business cycle theory. In other words, a general theory that central banks engineer the booms by artificially expanding credit, expanding the money supply, keeping interest rates artificially low, and that the busts that result can be laid at the feet of those same central banks. And I'd like to give you a quote from David Stockman in an interview last fall that really summarizes how big of a problem this is in our economy. The system we have now is one in which the Fed decides through a Politburo, a planner sitting in Washington, how much liquidity is necessary, what the interest rate should be, what the unemployment rate should be, and what economic growth should be. He continues, there is no honest pricing left at all anywhere in the world because central banks everywhere manipulate and rig the price of all financial assets. We can't even analyze the economy in the traditional sense anymore because so much of it depends not on market forces but on the whims of people at the Fed. We can look at our own lives for examples of how the Fed also distorts our microeconomic decision making. For instance, I recently rented a car, very nice car, luxurious car, had all the latest bells and whistles including a reverse backup camera, which apparently adds several thousand dollars to the price of new cars, almost all of which now have these cameras. When I got home, I googled this particular make and model, it turns out it costs about forty thousand dollars. I was thinking myself, how many Americans could really write a check for forty thousand dollars or in the alternative, if they had to borrow money for such a car at natural rates of interest, how many Americans would pay forty thousand dollars for a car. So I did a little digging and I discovered that in 1974, the median car price in the US was about three thousand seven hundred dollars compared to a median household income of about ten thousand dollars. Today, the median price of a new car in America is thirty two thousand dollars or a six hundred and forty one dollar monthly car payment relative to a median household income of about fifty two thousand dollars. So we've seen that cars have gotten much more expensive. Now to be fair, we are comparing apples and oranges here to an extent. In 1974, cars were not nearly as nice. They were not nearly as durable. They didn't have all the options that cars today have. They certainly didn't last well into the six figures in terms of mileage. So it is an apples to oranges comparison. But nonetheless, you have to ask yourself, without a fed with interest rates at natural levels, what would cars even look like today? Now, a Keynesian might say, well, this is good. This is an example of using monetary policy as demand side stimulus. And as a result, the average Joe today can have a car that's much fancier and nicer than the average Joe could have in 1974. But this misses several important points. First of all, it supposes that it's healthy for us to be a nation of debtors, a nation of people who just assume that we buy things on credit. But we all know that for a country to be truly prosperous, both individuals and private firms have to accumulate capital, not accumulate debt. Second, of course, is that unnaturally low interest rates punish savers, which oftentimes is older people or people on fixed incomes who are counting on their investment portfolio to carry them through their retirement years. So what we have right now is an absolute debacle for savers. And even aggressive investors have to go out and work very hard to earn 3% or 4% on their portfolios just to stay ahead of inflation. And finally, of course, is that if this goes on forever, if people become aware that inflation is actually the policy of the Fed, then at some point we risk a hyperinflationary spectacle, which Mises termed the crack-up boom. In other words, at some point people understand that the Fed is never going to stop tapering, is never going to stop increasing the money supply, is never going to stop, in effect, artificially suppressing interest rates, which can only lead ultimately to the devaluation of the dollar. So despite the Keynesian idea that monetary stimulus is healthy for the economy because it creates consumer demand, what we find in fact is that David Stockman is correct. It creates a landscape where we have no honest pricing and even at the consumer level when it comes to an automobile and how fancy it is and what options it has, everything has been distorted, our consumer preferences have been distorted. We have no honest pricing and no honest money in this country. The Fed doesn't just affect the macroeconomic climate of whole countries or whole nations, it also affects the microeconomic climate in which you and I lead our daily lives.