Stansberry Research LLC has the typical Wall Street con job in 12-Term Congressman Ron Paul’s Warning to Americans about the Coming Currency Crisis. Read the small fine print below that interview if you are actually naive enough to look at the interview. This guy is such a good con artist, you might come away believing what he says despite my warnings here.

Legal Notices: Ron Paul is a spokesman for Stansberry Research, LLC.

In looking for a good way to convey the magnitude of this con job, I started a Google search which led me to the WikiPedia article Stansberry Research.

In 2014, Snopes.com investigated the firm’s claim that United States currency will “collapse”, and found such claims to be false

Here is the Snopes article Collapsing Currency.

Claim:   The U.S. dollar will officially collapse after 1 July 2014 due to the implementation of H.R. 2847.

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FALSE

To be certain, there are some things that Ron Paul says that are true, but the conclusions he draws from them are somewhat insane. After all, he is selling you something and he has to make a good, plausible story. I couldn’t actually last through the whole presentation to see what it was he was actually selling. They weren’t going to put a time line at the bottom of the video to give you any clue as to how long you would have to wait to hear the money proposition. There was a brief mention of gold in the part I listened to.

For full disclosure, I should mention that in the 1970s I did buy the book You Can Profit From A Monetary Crisis by Harry Browne © 1977. The crisis didn’t come, but I sure lost money buying gold in the way that the book recommended. In inflation adjusted dollars, I don’t think that gold has ever risen to what I bought it for in the 1970s. I bought gold back then for $700 to $800 per ounce. Today’s price is $1,074. What I invested in since the 1970s has returned far, far more than the continued loss I would have endured if I hadn’t sold off the gold.

What is true about Paul’s presentation, is that the current stock market bubble is a product of the massive amounts of liquidity that the FED has introduced into the economy to keep it afloat. At some point the chickens will come home to roost. The collapse of the stock market in 1929 brought on a huge period of deflation, not inflation. So there is no telling what is actually going to happen when it bursts. The price of gold has been falling for years while these guys have been predicting it will rise. No doubt the price of gold will rise some day, but you have no way of telling how much it will fall before then. No doubt the stock market will fall some day, but you have no way of telling how much it will rise before then.

Ron Paul is right, that massive introduction of liquidity by the FED is not the way to solve our current economic crisis. What he doesn’t tell you about the FED’s use of this ineffective FED tool for solving the current crisis, is that this is the only tool they have. What we really need is for the massive infrastructure investment that Bernie Sanders is calling for instead of what the FED has done. The only reason the FED has to do what they have tried to do is the realization that the Congress is not going to approve the stimulus that they should have done during the Reagan, Bush, and Bush years. Instead, what Congress, Reagan, Bush, and Bush did was to give us a massive transfer of wealth from the middle class to the rich. The FED did what it could to offset this wrong policy by the legislative and executive branches. Instead of bailing out the banks, they should have nationalized them. We put far more FED money into the banks than they were worth, so there should not be any problem with a little Democratic Socialism of taking ownership of what we bought at more than fair market value.

So Ron Paul is right that recent policy has been a disaster, but he has not even a clue as to what the right policy would have been. He has not a clue about basic economics. The solution to our problems would have been the classical Keynesian prescription that eventually got us out of the last depression after every other bad policy was tried and failed. What Keynes said was that there has to be direct government intervention to get people employed. He didn’t say that the way to do it had to be a World War, but that is what the politicians chose. Think of the massive destruction of Europe and its recovery thanks in part to the USA’s Marshall Plan. Did we do some massive destruction in Japan, too? There was that atomic bomb think that we can’t have forgotten about already. Does Ron Paul have an explanation of how our government didn’t produce any wealth back then? Where does he think the recovery of Europe and Japan came from?

Bernie Sanders is saying the way to do it is with a massive government employment project that includes a rebuilding of our infrastructure. Fat chance anybody will allow that to happen. If the electorate comes to the conclusion that Ron Paul does know his ass from his elbow, we will be merrily cutting the budget, trying to run a surplus, and driving the world to the deepest depression we have ever seen. So Ron Paul is right about the possible collapse and depression, but it is not for the reasons he says. The reason for the collapse will be exactly the following of what he prescribes to prevent it or the following of our current trajectory of taking money from the middle class and giving it to the rich. The current trajectory will keep making the rich richer until the revolution comes, as history seems to say must be the inevitable outcome.