US Money Supply Plunges At 1930s Pace

... as Obama eyes fresh stimulus

by Ambrose Evans-Pritchard - May 26th, 2010 - London Telegraph

The M3 money supply in the United States is contracting at an accelerating rate that now matches the average decline seen from 1929 to 1933, despite near zero interest rates and the biggest fiscal blitz in history.

The M3 figures - which include broad range of bank accounts and are tracked by British and European monetarists for warning signals about the direction of the US economy a year or so in advance - began shrinking last summer. The pace has since quickened.

Since Barack Obama's financial advisers are all Keynesians who the article notes "despise traditional monetary theory and have a religious aversion to any mention of the quantity of money" their actions are not truly a suprise.

The financial genius of the last century, Milton Friedman is ignored by these totalitarian loving statist believers, assembled specifically by Obama to prove that American prosperity at the end of the 20th century was a fluke and not the result of trusting free enterprise.

Obama's advisers are going back in history and attempting the same techniques used by FDR in the 1930s to "fix" free enterprise. Like the failures of that decade the techniques they are using are failing again. That Obama's advisors are truly clueless is proved by the fact that they are surprised and confused by getting the same results that FDR did. Isn't there an old cliche about trying the same thing again and again and getting the same results?