Economic Instability Quotes
This frequent Jefferson quotation almost certainly was never written or uttered by him but was probably created by later opponents of private banks. It has never been verified from any studies of Jefferson’s prolific writings. Further the word ‘inflation” came into use in the 1860s and ‘deflation’ seems to have first been used in the 1920s. However, some ascribe it to a letter Jefferson wrote to Treasury Secretary, Albert Gallatin in 1802.
This quote is misattributed to Keynes. The first recorded version of this was a 1986 presentation given by Gary Shilling, an influential financial advisor twice named Wall Street’s top economist in a poll conducted by Institutional Investor magazine, as reported by The Advertiser newspaper of Montgomery, Alabama. The next recorded evidence is a Forbes article by Shilling in February, 1993. See linked quote.
Credit default swaps were in large part responsible for the melt down of the economy of 2008 and the Great Recession thereafter. A credit default swap was one of the favorite derivatives that became popular. Is an insurance policy that a company will pay off its bonds and not go bankrupt. It is a cross between an insurance mechanism and a stock exchange type security mechanism, and through heavy lobbying, escaped any kind of regulation. It cost a company no money to write a credit default swap, and they were paid to do so. As long as business and the economy was good, it was a terrific business but there was no way of ever knowing how much risk they were taking. So companies who wrote credit default swaps did not have to have the money to pay to back them up. When that happened in 2008, even the largest insurance company in the world collapsed because of the risk of having to pay the credit default swap and the U. S. Government had to take over the insurance company. In 2010, the Obama administration passed a financial reform bill that began to regulate credit default swaps. Buffet, the American who had made the most money in financial securities, realized the great danger not only to the company, but to the entire national economy. Most of the rest of the financial institutions, could make large amounts of money without have to have much capital as long as things went well. So credit default swaps began to exceed the other financial instruments in activity. Neither the Federal Reserve or the other government regulatory agencies chose to regulate these risky instruments nor even to require that they be publicly disclosed -- See {637987}, {637986} and {637992}.
The American Revolution was a trying time, not only militarily but in just about every other way as well. Washington was quite pessimistic in 1778 as this quotation demonstrates. But it was to get worse. See {624230}. And the rapacity even extended to war profiteering. {624227}.
Actually during this period, automation and other forms of technological unemployment have been far more responsible for the loss of good jobs in America than offshoring which has been far more responsible than competition from immigrants.
