The private sector is more effective than the federal government in enacting positive economic change, speakers at this week’s Center for Constructive Alternatives seminars said.
The college hosted its second CCA of the academic year Nov. 10-13, covering “Economic Issues and Controversies.”
Nicolas Cachanosky of the University of Texas at El Paso spoke Sunday afternoon about auditing the Federal Reserve.
“Since 2011, we’ve had at least 12 ‘audit the Fed’ proposals submitted to Congress,” Cachanosky said.
Cachanosky cited three options that can be interconnected for how to deal with the Fed, ranging from a closer look at money management, to an audit of monetary policy, to ending the Fed.
“When you read about ‘audit the Fed,’ you have to think of which of the three meanings a person is talking about,” Cachanosky said. “It might be different in the endgame.”
Cachanosky also discussed the problems of completely eliminating the Fed, as there is no concrete alternative.
“If you think of the gold standard as a reference, if you shut down the central bank, your base money, which is gold, is still in place,” Cachanosky said. “That is not the world we live in. We live in a world of fiat money. If you eliminate the central bank in a fiat money regime, you can not fall back onto gold.”
Jeffrey B. Snider of Atlas Financial spoke Monday evening on “The American Dollar and the Eurodollar.”
Eurodollars, U.S. dollars not stored within U.S. borders, allow banks to transfer ledgers internationally without worrying about currency conversions, according to Snider.
“If you wanted to participate in global commerce, it was no more difficult than connecting to the network,” Snider said.
Snider said the Eurodollar initially caused the United States to experience great prosperity, but economic growth slowed in 2008 due to the Eurodollar’s inability to keep up with the rest of the economy.
“Right around 2008, growth trends shifted,” Snider said. “The entire global economy, which was performing one way one day, was suddenly doing something entirely different.”
Snyder said the government told people have been told the Fed has printed trillions of dollars even though bank ledgers say otherwise.
“The Federal Reserve may have created trillions in bank reserves, but bank reserves are not money in this Eurodollar system,” Snider said. “Essentially, the Eurodollar breakdown of 2008 has spiraled out of control into all of these various problems all over the world because it is a global reserve currency.”
Joel C. Sercel, founder of the Trans Astranautica Corporation, gave a speech Tuesday afternoon on space mining.
Sercel said the cost of launching cargo into low Earth orbit decreased after Elon Musk started SpaceX. He said the reduced cost of launching spacecraft increases the possibility of mining asteroids for precious materials.
“There’s enough material in the asteroids to build worlds with a thousand times the carrying capacity of the Earth,” Sercel said.
The CCA concluded with a faculty roundtable Wednesday afternoon.
Associate Professor of Politics Mark Kremer spoke of a balance in the space industry between being completely private sector and being under government control, partly ushered in by Elon Musk’s SpaceX.
“It seems that the benefit from using Musk is that he’s gotten costs down and he’s opened up these new possibilities,” Kremer said. “Because it is space-related, I’d imagine it would be highly regulated. It’s just too much of a national concern to leave it to a private company alone.”