Care to give a specific reason why?
Here are some more specific reasons,
from his own writings:
I have, for the past 35 years, expressed my grave concern for the future of America. The course we have taken over the past century has threatened our liberties, security and prosperity.
In other words, despite thirty-five years of relatively straightforward growth, including the longest peacetime expansion of the economy in US history, he's been predicting gloom and disaster. As timhau pointed out, this is like someone predicting snow tomorrow every day since mid-July and finally taking credit for it in December.
There are reasons to believe this coming crisis is different and bigger than any the world has ever experienced. Instead of using globalism in a positive fashion, it's been used to globalize all of the mistakes of the politicians, bureaucrats and central bankers. [...]The central banks of the world secretly collude to centrally plan the world economy. I'm convinced that agreements among central banks to “monetize” U.S. debt these past 15 years have existed, although secretly and out of the reach of any oversight of anyone – especially the U.S. Congress that doesn't care, or just flat doesn't understand.
He's a conspiracy 'tard.
The financial crisis, still in its early stages, is apparent to everyone: gasoline prices over $4 a gallon; skyrocketing education and medical-care costs; the collapse of the housing bubble; the bursting of the NASDAQ bubble; stock markets plunging; unemployment rising; massive underemployment; excessive government debt; and unmanageable personal debt. Little doubt exists as to whether we'll get stagflation.
Little doubt except among actual economists -- and among the real world. We're not seeing stagflation; in fact, we're not seeing inflation at all.
Of course, economists know why, because they understand what causes inflation, and it's not what Paul thinks causes it:
We cannot understand what we're facing without understanding fiat money and the long-developing dollar bubble.
There were several stages. From the inception of the Federal Reserve System in 1913 to 1933, the Central Bank established itself as the official dollar manager. By 1933, Americans could no longer own gold, thus removing restraint on the Federal Reserve to inflate for war and welfare.
Of course. Inflation is
all a plot by the Fed. Riiiiiiiiight.
Ironically in these past 35 years, we have benefited from this very flawed system. Because the world accepted dollars as if they were gold,
.... because gold is the only "real" source of money. It couldn't possibly that the world accepted dollars
as if they were dollars, could it?
If you want to buy, for example, equity in American companies on the NYSE, you need to spend dollars to do it. Since American corporate equity has been an extremely good investment for the past thirty-five years, it makes sense that the world would accept dollars because they needed to invest them. we only had to counterfeit more dollars, spend them overseas (indirectly encouraging our jobs to go overseas as well) and enjoy unearned prosperity. Those who took our dollars and gave us goods and services were only too anxious to loan those dollars back to us. This allowed us to export our inflation and delay the consequences we now are starting to see.
Printing dollars over long periods of time may not immediately push prices up – yet in time it always does.
Really? Then why are we printing so much money NOW and not seeing inflation? Oh, yeah,.... because that's not how inflation works. Real economists talk about inflation as a combination of both money supply and money velocity -- since people aren't spending, the money we have isn't circulating fast enough to support current prices, and the only way to prevent a DEFLATIONARY spiral is to print more money. Which is what the Fed, oddly enough, has been doing for the past year, which is why we're seeing relatively stable prices. And they're starting to unwind the increase in money supply more or less right now, as the economy moves into recovery mode, to keep inflation under control as we come out, but they can't pull out too fast or we'll see the 1937 crash all over again. (Paul Krugman, a Nobel laureate in economics, has written extensively about this, if you want to see what a real economist has to say.)
But you can also see a bit of the "snow-in-July" rhetoric as well. Yes, there will eventually be inflation, I'm sure. I'm sure that sometime in the mid 2030's, there's be an unexpected bout of inflation beyond the capacity of the Fed to control, and he can say that he's been predicting inflation for twenty-five years.
Basically, he's a populist Gold Bug with the economic understanding of a codfish.
