by Peter Schiff, Schiff Gold:

Earlier this month, Peter Schiff said Federal Reserve policy is pushing us toward a no-growth, high-inflation economy.

There are a number of factors in play. There are growing inflation pressures. There are record amounts of debt – both government and corporate. But behind all of these symptoms, we have a disease.

Ron Paul digs down to the root causes of our economic woes in this in-depth look at the US financial system and the need for reform. Paul says a monetary crisis is coming. What will replace the dollar? Paul makes a strong case for gold.

The following article by Ron Paul was originally published at Mises.org.

Introduction: Where We Are

It’s a fallacy to believe the US has a free market economy. The economy is run by a conglomerate of individuals and special interests, in and out of government, including the Deep State, which controls central economic planning.

Rigging the economy is required to prevent market forces from demanding a halt to the mistakes that planners continuously make. This deceptive policy can last only for a limited time. Ultimately, the market proves more powerful than government manipulation of economic events. The longer the process lasts, the greater the bubble that always bursts. The planners in charge have many tools to perpetuate confidence in an unstable system, but common sense should tell us that grave dangers lie ahead.

Their policies strive to convince the unknowing that the dollar is strong and its status as the world’s reserve currency is secure, no matter how many new dollars they create of out of thin air. It is claimed that our foreign debt is always someone else’s fault and never related to our own monetary and economic mismanagement.

Official government reports inevitably claim inflation is low and we must work harder to increase it, claiming price increases somehow mystically indicate economic growth.

The Consumer Price Index is the statistic manipulated to try to prove this point just as they use misleading GDP numbers to do the same. Many people now recognizing these reports are nothing more than propaganda. Anybody who pays the bills to maintain a household knows the truth about inflation.

Ever since the Great Depression, controlling the dollar price of gold and deciding who gets to hold gold was official policy. This advanced the Federal Reserve’s original goal of demonetizing precious metals, which was fully achieved in August 1971. Today, even though the official position of all central banks is that gold is not money, central bankers constantly rig the dollar price of gold, pretending the dollar is stronger than it really is. Just as the market overrode the artificial price of $35 per ounce in the 1970’s, today’s price will soar when the dollar is dethroned as the king of the world’s currencies.

In the rigged financial system, stock and bond prices are kept artificially high for the wealthy on Wall Street. To do this, interest rates have to be kept below market rates—which is a major contributing factor to gross economic distortions and financial bubbles.

The false belief setting the stage for an economic crash is the doctrine of “deficits don’t matter,” endorsed universally in the nation’s capital, has been going on for decades. We are destined to soon find out that deficits do matter, and matter very much. Denying economic truth and common sense for long periods of time always ends badly.

If one were to listen only to the MSM recite government economic reports, concerns for the future would be minimal. Low unemployment rates, negligible inflation, no hot war going on, and the US remains the wealthiest and militarily the most powerful nation in history. Are the worriers justified in their concerns?

There are a lot of them yet the Fed doesn’t seem to be concerned, but then again it has never warned of trouble ahead, even when a major correction was at our doorstep. This is either because the Fed chairmen don’t know any better, or they don’t want to panic the people into preparing for a crisis by knowing the truth. My guess is that it’s both.

One thing for sure is that middle class America is not of much concern to the money managers. What occupies their minds is how to protect Wall Street from any financial crisis that might arise. The monetary elite are alert as to who will be blamed, and the Fed in particular, must be protected.

Since 1987, it’s been the responsibility of the Plunge Protection Team (the president’s Working Group on Financial Markets) to protect Wall Street from sudden and severe corrections in the stock and bond markets.

There are four powerful agencies that secretly can do just about anything they care to do to protect the monetary elites. They are: the Federal Reserve Bank, the US Treasury Department, the Securities and Exchange Commission, and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission. It’s my opinion that the Treasury’s Exchange Stabilization Fund, which was funded by gold confiscated in 1934 by FDR at $20 per ounce and immediately repriced at $35, is still “legally” permitted to be engaged in the gold market and foreign exchange rates.

The key individuals, involved in any rescue operation during a financial crisis, are the Fed Chairman, the Treasury Secretary, the Chairman of the SEC, and the CFTC. We can be assured that they were quite active in the financial crisis of 2007 and in the years of quantitative easing failures that followed. Today’s amazing stock market “success” (as of January 2018) is especially interesting since there is a net outflow of funds from the market. This means that the PPT has been successful in delaying the major correction that is required.

Abnormally low interest rates permit buybacks, mergers, and direct intervention in purchasing stocks and bonds by the PPT or by its allies around the world, with funds clandestinely provided by the Fed, to prop up the market and manipulate the gold price. There’s good reason the financial elite hysterically oppose an audit of the Fed.

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