Congratulations on your new job.  To help you out, I've enclosed three pieces of advice to follow when you encounter an intractable problem.  Open them in order.

The next day in the meetings he blamed it on his predecessor and told of all the things that weren't done right... routine patching left undone, documentation in disarray. Upper management grumbled but agreed to give him the time to fix it.

Two years later there was another outage. This one went on for a day or two and management was once again getting angry about things and so he went to his desk and pulled out the second letter. "Blame it on the hardware."

With that, he went in pointing out that they were years behind on keeping the hardware itself up to date. Upper management grumbled again but agreed to a budget that allowed him to update the hardware.

For a while, everything was smooth and then it hit... another outage. He went to his desk and opened the third letter. "Prepare three envelopes."

He set the stage for the financial crisis that started crumbling a year after he left the fed chair. It wasn't all his fault (politicians lost any spine and bankers any sense), but he was the conductor.

I don't think anyone really holds him responsible for the dotnet crash of 2000 as that was a market issue and irrational exuberance issue and not a monetary one.

And 2008 was similar. The Fed doesn't control or have any responsibility for lower lender standards or ARM mortgages.

Congress was responsible for the GSE's that bought any mortgages and wrote insurance on those mortgages, so you can't blame the FED for that.

Wallstreet are their regulators were responsible for the securitization of mortgages that went bad in 2008, not the FED.

At worst you can say they had the wrong monetary policy but that's an opinion and not something that can be said as a fact.

Can you flesh out how you feel Greenspan is responsible for 2008?

I don't understand why people keep banging about the theoretical advantaged of a gold standard whan it was the default monetary system for centuries and we have firsthand evidence of the problems it causes (and certainly not more equality in the world!). It has been tried by the whole Earth during several generations.

If you think, like Greenspan and others, that there ought to be a mechanism to force some monetary restraint on governments, try to think of a new mechanism, because the "old way" wasn't better. We know it. Move on.

The Gilded Age, which had quite high levels of inequality, occurred when the gold standard was active:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gilded_Age

It should also be noted that the gold standard did not bring any kind of price stability:

* https://archive.is/https://www.theatlantic.com/business/arch...

Further, sticking to the gold standard made the Great Depression worse as it reduced flexibility and options of central banks had, and made deflation worse:

* https://www.nber.org/papers/w3488

The sooner countries left the gold standard the sooner they started recovering from the Great Depression:

* https://www.nber.org/papers/w27586

- spending cuts

- stopping fraud

- figuring out how the net worth of people in Congress increases from hundreds of thousands of dollars to 10s or 100s of millions of dollars

- addressing wasteful and ineffective programs

Given those issues, the only solution will be inflation. The circling the drain moment will hit with the associated welfare programs get a direct staple to inflation itself, so we will spend more to combat inflation, causing more inflation faster.

It's not going to be fun.

At the height of the Great Depression (1936), some economists proposed The Chicago Plan to separate the provision of credit from the money supply by eliminating fractional reserve banking, giving better control of the increases and contractions of credit, the elimination of bank runs, and a dramatic reduction in debt. There was a recent (2012) paper from the IMF [1] that seemed to find this actually is pretty sensible, although I do not claim to be smart enough to understand all of the implications.

[1] https://www.imf.org/en/publications/wp/issues/2016/12/31/the...

>near unlimited government credit

Really? How do we get some? And, beyond that, what do YOU think the limits should be on increasing the money supply by a sovereign nation?

A nation becomes wealthy by producing things to sell. Nothing else matters, including debt. But, we live in a world where people want to be rich, but also don't want to use resources, or build, or manufacture things, or run an empire. It's contradictory, and we are starting to see the effects.

Prices should get cheaper. That's a progress dividend. We get better at growing food every year, why shouldn't food get cheaper? Imagine a world in which prices regularly go down. You're a passive beneficiary of technological progress.

The argument that prices can't get cheaper or [bad thing will happen] was never very convincing to me. Prices already do get cheaper for large swaths of the economy that have technological progress grow faster than money supply. Cell phones are rapidly depreciating. You can wait 6m to a year and get a significant discount on the latest iPhone version. People don't stop buying iPhones, and Apple doesn't stop investing in iPhones. This is even more true w/ AI models. Investors/companies are burning billions to build tech that will only get cheaper and obsolete in years if not months.

So if you were to try to convince me that deflation would reduce investment or spending, tell me why this doesn't apply to tech products that get cheaper every year.

As I understand it, all the gold that has ever been mined would fit in a cube the size of a baseball diamond.

https://www.businessinsider.com/warren-buffetts-lesson-on-go...

Nixon was responsible for ending the silver standard.

https://www.usmoneyreserve.com/news/executive-insights/when-...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silver_standard#United_States