Jim Grant Strikes again

 I love this guy he cracks me up!



Notable quotes for those who don't want to watch the video


Grant's thoughts on new Fed additions:
"I think the first order of business will be to try once more to print enough dollars to make something happen in the U.S. economy.”

On San Francisco Fed President Janet Yellen:
“Janet Yellen has had 36 opportunities to vote on monetary policy at the Federal Open Market Committee and she has voted ‘Aye, yes’ 36 times. 36 for 36 times. Now, has the Fed been right 36 consecutive times? No. I think that Janet Yellen is a well credentialed, consensus-hugging economist straight out of the Fed HR department. She is ideal from the point of view of the Fed bureaucracy. She will make not one ripple.”

On MIT economist Steve Diamond and Maryland state banking regulator Sarah Bloom Raskin:
“I’ve never met them but I suppose they are charming. They certainly are well credentialed. They may well have an avocation in monetary theory, but that is not their vocation. Their vocation, in the case of Professor Diamond, is fiscal policy, pensions, social security, he is an authority.  He's mentor of Ben Bernanke so he’s a formidable academic.”

"Sarah Bloom Raskin is a formidable regulator. But neither is a formidable thinker about the nature of money or about the history of money or about how the Fed might paradoxically make things worse by doing what it does trying to make things better, which I think is the great question. These are people who, I think, are unlikely to oppose novel solutions to our fundamental monetary dilemma which is that the U.S. dollar is a faith-based currency of no intrinsic value that is manipulated by the Fed and the consequences of the manipulation are often quite different from what was intended. That’s the problem.”

On Fed monetary policy:
"Deflation is a funny thing. It's a word that is much in the news, much in the markets, but is all too infrequently to find. So the Fed says that deflation is broadly declining prices. But could not also be progress?  In other words, if the world produces more at lower prices, is that so bad? Americans spend half of their weekends, it seems, looking for bargains.”

"So the Fed is telling us that bargains galore is something that the Fed must resist with radical volumes of credit creation… I guess what I would ask the Fed is would it please stop and help us understand why this is bad?  So in 2002 and 2003, Alan Greenspan, then chairman, and Ben Bernanke, then a newly fledged governor, were out giving speeches saying that deflation is a clear and present danger, and we must - they said at the Fed - must cut rates dramatically, which they did to 1 percent."
"But the price indices today are much weaker than they were in 2003. So where is the Fed? Why not broach the topic of deflation again?"
"So what I blame the Fed for, among other things, is a lack of intellectual rigor and forthrightness."

On Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke:
"I think this is not being forthcoming with us, the people, about the nature of his concerns."
"In 2003, he was all deflation all the time. Well now the Cleveland Fed's median CPI was like 1.7 percent year-over-year, now it's 0.5 percent year-over-year. So where is the concern?"
"I think the concern will surface. We'll see more on Friday when the CPI comes out. But I think something ahead of the markets is a likelihood of the Fed stepping on the gas once more, so called quantitative easing - I think that's likely to happen…The Fed is already clearing its throat. You can see this in the newspaper leaks."