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Strategies & Market Trends : Mish's Global Economic Trend Analysis -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Tommaso who wrote (6678)	5/18/2004 10:16:20 PM
From: Elroy Jetson	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 116555

I used to be impressed with Milton Friedman until I studied economics in college. I think he's very much like the singer Madonna, constantly changing her hair color and style and thinking up outrageous comments or taking her clothes off to keep herself in the news. Friedman has always been so quick to follow he thinks he's in the lead. He has changed his economic perspective so many times over his career it hard to follow. Nothing wrong with being flexible but he tries to pretend he's always been saying the same thing which makes most economists sort of nauseated. He's a little like Bill Shockley who won the Nobel Prize and then used this as a platform for the rest of his life to promote his wacky theories that Anglo-Saxons are genetically superior to Italians, Jews, Blacks and others. Today Friedman pretends he's not a Monetarist. But he's real kissy face with his pal Ben "Bubbles" Bernanke and has nothing but high praise for Alan Greenspan, who has been baisically implementing Friedman's true ideas. Friedman's idiotic quote: "Because we know how to prevent deflation. There's nothing easier than to stop deflation, print money." - Milton Friedman can be compared with the insight of Charles Rist: "A policy aimed at monetary stability will secure a relative stability of prices, but the economic history of the 1920's teaches us that a policy whose goal is stabilization of prices may result in inflation of money and credit, and very unsound speculation. Harvard economist Joseph Schumpeter was more direct: "policy does not allow a choice between depression and no depression, but between depression now and a worse depression later: inflation pushed far enough would undoubtedly turn depression into the sham prosperity so familiar from European postwar (WW-I) experience, [and]... would, in the end, lead to a collapse worse than the one it was called in to remedy. For "recovery is sound only if it does come of itself. For any revival which is merely due to artificial stimulus leaves part of the work of depressions undone and adds, to an undigested remnant of maladjustment, new maladjustment of its own which has to be liquidated in turn, thus threatening business with another worse crisis ahead"