U.S. Decapitalization, Easy Money, And Asset Price Cycles.

In Matthew 25: 14-30, Jesus recounts the Parable of the Talents, the story of how the master goes away and leaves each of three servants with sums of money to look after in his absence, He then returns and holds them to account. The first two have invested wisely and give the master a good return, and he rewards them. The third, however, is a wicked servant who couldn't be bothered even to put the money in the bank where it could earn interest. Instead, he simply buried the money and gave his master a zero return. He is punished and thrown into the darkness where there is weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth. In the modern American version of the parable, the eternal truth of the original remains: Good stewardship is as important as it always was and there is still one master the American public (albeit in name only) who entrusts capital to the stewardship of his supposed servants. Instead of three, however, there are now only two: the Federal Reserve and the federal government. They are not especially wicked, but they certainly are incompetent. They run amok and manage to squander so much of their master's capital that he is ultimately ruined, and it is he rather than they who goes on to suffer an eternity of wailing and teeth-gnashing, not to mention impoverishment. For their part, the two incompetent servants deny all responsibility, as politicians always do, and since there is no accountability (let alone Biblical justice) in the modern version, ride off into the sunset insisting that none of this was their fault.