Re: How America Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Deficits and Debt by Neil Irwin
Dear Sirs:
Reading Mr. Irwin’s Doctor Strangelove-esque article about whether or not deficits really matter, I was struck by this sentence, which was a paragraph in itself in the middle of his article:
“Then came the global financial crisis.”
Mr. Irwin treats the 2008/9 crisis as if it were an asteroid–completely random, unexpected, unpredictable, and beyond human volition. It was none of this. The global financial crisis was caused in large part by fiat money credit expansion, the very role of which Mr. Irwin’s article attempts to investigate. Interest rates were suppressed in the early 2000’s and continue to this day. The bitter fruits of this practice are inevitable.
Patrick Barron
