Altes Elliott-Wellen-Forum - The Stock Market, Profits, and Credit Expansion / sehr interess. Artikel

---- ELLI ----

02.08.2002, 17:15

The Stock Market, Profits, and Credit Expansion / sehr interess. Artikel

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Leider ist er zu lang um in hier komplett rein zu stellen.
Die Quelle ist hier: http://www.mises.org/fullstory.asp?control=1014

Daher nur Kapital 9.

The Stock Market, Profits, and Credit Expansion

By <st2:PersonName>
<st1:GivenName>
George</st1:GivenName>
<st1:Sn>
Reisman<a title href="http://www.mises.org/fullstory.asp?control=1014#_ftn1" name="_ftnref1">*</a></st1:Sn>
</st2:PersonName>
<a title href="http://www.mises.org/fullstory.asp?control=1014#_ftn2" name="_ftnref2">*</a>

9. The Only Thing that Today's
Intellectuals Can See

In the financial whirlpool that sooner or later follows from
credit expansion, many businessmen are put to trials they would never have had
to face in the absence of credit expansion. Some are found wanting, as they try
to save their firms and their fortunes by dishonest means, such as falsification
of their financial statements.

The great mass of today's intellectuals, of course, have no
idea of the actual economic forces at work in connection with credit expansion.
Not having studied the writings of <st1:Sn>
Mises</st1:Sn>
and other theorists of the Austrian and British classical schools, these forces
are invisible to them, because they lack the intellectual framework that would
permit them to observe them. Instead, they focus on the sins of businessmen. For
that is all that they are equipped to see.

And here their ignorance of economics combines with an
underlying mentality of such primitiveness that it recalls that of the wretched
people of the Dark Ages or that of the members of savage tribes. In the Dark
Ages and among savages, when calamities occurred, such as one's hut being washed
away by a flood, or one's animals or family members falling prey to a disease, a
typical response would be to blame the occurrence not on any natural phenomenon,
operating according to scientifically lawful principles, but on the ill will of
an evil spirit, and to seek relief not in the better understanding and
application of scientific principles but in the greater power of a benevolent,
protective spirit.

The only difference between then and now is that today's
intellectuals substitute for the good and evil spirits of savages and the Dark
Ages, the great gods"State" and"Government" and the
Devil's"Big Business,""Capitalism," and"The Profit
Motive." And in their ignorance and primitiveness, they seek to destroy the
foundations of their own and everyone else's material well-being and very lives.
For this is the meaning of their assaults on big business, capitalism, and the
profit motive, which by the standard of man's life and well-being are clearly
good, not evil.

Small and narrow as the focus on the dishonesty and fraud of
some businessmen may be, it nevertheless does have a real object. Unfortunately,
it is overwhelmingly misdirected and totally ignores the truly massive fraud
that is going on, which exceeds many thousand times over, all the frauds of
dishonest businessmen, and which, as we have seen, actually occasions many of
those frauds. This, of course, is the government's systematic depreciation of
the value of paper money and thus of each and every contract and security that
is stated in terms of a fixed number of units of that money.

What greater accounting scandal and coverup could there be
than that the monetary unit, in which all accounting is carried on, is itself a
fraud, a fraud that has robbed tens of millions of old people of a considerable
part of the buying power of their life's savings, that has destroyed the
reliability of fixed-income investments as a vehicle for providing for the
future, and threatens the value of all contracts. Where are the reporters and
the congressional committees to investigate this horrendous situation?

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