Printing Money: For the Birds -- and Banks

Go to Heaven for the climate, Hell for the company. -- Mark Twain

It is no surprise that Tim Geithner and Ben Bernanke's plan to steal trillions of dollars from hardworking, taxpaying Americans and give it away to their friends on Wall Street would cause a big rally in the stock market.

Unfortunately, Geithner's plan is flawed. Its primary objective is to prevent any bankruptcies or receiverships in the politically favored money-center banking and Wall Street financial sectors. Put simply, the plan inflates the value of toxic assets, held by the money-center banks like Citigroup(C Quote) and Bank of America (BAC Quote) and Wall Street firms such as Goldman Sachs (GS Quote) and Morgan Stanley (MS Quote), and gives away trillions in free taxpayer money to other politically connected private equity and hedge funds to buy those assets.

Geithner's plan, combined with the Fed's unprecedented monetization of our debt and money-printing, are the worst possible approaches to dealing with our economic problems. These actions by the Treasury and the Fed are major reasons why the Chinese recently announced publicly that they have lost faith in the dollar and want to move away from it as a reserve currency.

The implications of this move by the Chinese, which is also being supported by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and other developing nations, are not being fully understood by the media or the financial markets and will be extremely negative for our country down the road.

To put it in very simple terms, think of what happens when somebody with very little savings has his credit taken away. He goes broke very quickly. That is what will happen to us if the world moves away from the dollar as a reserve currency. Our ability to print the dollar at will and use it as means of repayment to the rest of the world for decades has assured our prosperity even in the face of absurdly incompetent management of our economy and outrageous overconsumption by our population.