Mises Institute sobre la crisis

Para el que tenga tiempo en interés en saber más de lo que puede leer en los pobres periódicos españoles sobre la crisis financiera, el Mises Institute recopila buenos artículos sobre las verdaderas causas de la crisis. Más allá de que Bush es malo y los banqueros unos codiciosos, que ya sabemos que también.

En uno de los artículos, se dice que la burbuja inmobiliaria norteamericana es la más grande burbuja especulativa de la historia. Y eso sí que da miedo.

When you look at the graph of the Case-Shiller residential real-estate index, an index dating from 1890 to the present and an index which measures the cost of housing in comparison to other goods, the first thing you see is that the 2001 to 2006 bubble stands out like a fifty foot saguaro cactus in a patch of daisies. There simply has never been anything like it before.

When you know what you are looking at — the biggest bubble in history — it is scary.

To be precise, the Case-Shiller Index in its entire 110-year history had never crossed 140 until the recent bubble. In 2006, it reached 210. Every single real-estate bubble in the past has at best been followed by a fall back to at least the 110 level in the postwar era, although the bubble preceding the Great Depression witnessed a fall to 60.

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Produce a lot of something, and it becomes worth less. And given the losses at Fannie and Freddie, the taxpayer guarantee, and the ongoing initiation of Boomer retirement, only the inflation tax will work to pay for keeping Fannie and Freddie afloat.

Like it or not, we are about to enter interesting times, and it is too bad our supposed professional civil servants at the Congressional Budget Office have failed to tell the emperor the truth: that he is buck-naked bankrupt and getting ready to take a lot of people with him.

Our only hope is to (1) accept up front a twenty-percent fall in American living standards for a people living beyond their means for the past twenty-five years on the delusions made possible by fiat money, and (2) simultaneously discipline the creature from Jekyll Island, a.k.a. the Federal Reserve System, not to create new money just to prop up asset-price bubbles.

Malos tiempos para los norteamericanos, que llevan demasiado tiempo viviendo por encima de sus posibilidades. ¿No parece esto similar a España?