Mark Thornton, Ludwig von Mises Institute
A paper given at the "Birth and Death of the Fed" conference, Jekyll Island, Georgia, February 26–27, 2010.
In February of 2004, I published an article entitled "Greenspam." The general lesson was not to listen to Greenspan's deceptive testimony. Delete it from your mind like spam email messages. Watch what he has done and what he is doing, in order to protect your wealth and capital. Discount anything you read about his testimony, except Congressmen Paul's questions and commentary.
This talk will be a follow up to that article. I will describe central banking as a confidence game. The Federal Reserve plays a confidence game with us. A confidence game (also known as a bunko, con, flimflam, hustle, scam, scheme, or swindle) is defined as an attempt to defraud a person or group by gaining their confidence. The victim is known as the mark, the trickster is called a confidence man, con man, or con artist, and any accomplices are known as shills. Confidence men exploit human characteristics such as greed, vanity, honesty, compassion, credulity, and naïveté. The common factor is that the mark relies on the good faith of the con artist.
Here I will concentrate on the Fed's basic confidence game of trying to gain and maintain our confidence in its system and getting us to not take proper precautions against the negative effects of its policies.
Inflation is surely a scam and part of the confidence game — printing up money and lowering the value of all dollar-denominated assets while simultaneously benefitting political friends and accomplices is surely a fraud that could be classified as a confidence game. This is even more true because when the people finally lose confidence in the Fed system and realize what the Fed has been doing, the game will be up, the dollar will go down, and the Fed will come to an end!
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