Currency Cure: Deregulation

Charles Goyette is author of The Dollar Meltdown: Surviving the Impending Currency Crisis with Gold, Oil, and Other Unconventional Investments.

It's a question that comes up continually, as though the consequences of generations of fiscal and monetary irresponsibility can be wished away: how can the coming currency crisis be alleviated?

One may as well ask for a cure for the Sunday morning hangover. The only real cure is the exercise of good behavior and sound judgment on Saturday night.

While fiscal temperance and monetary integrity have been in short supply, it remains astonishing that the country is willing to keep tolerating the governing classes that led the Saturday night revelries.

So far, before the last round of intoxication (and toxic paper) has been metabolized (or liquidated), they have offered to ease our pain with the old "hair of the dog." The Fed keeps spiking the punchbowl, while the administration reaches for another bottle of stimulus moonshine. Meanwhile, now that they have been tossed out of the bar, Republicans are pledging their new-found fiscal sobriety. We've heard it all before.

Abandoning the happy-hour homily of Dick "deficits-don't-matter" Cheney for the sober wisdom of Milton Friedman that the level of taxation is equal to the level of government spending, it is apparent that the only real solution to our economic problems, born as they are of unsustainable debt, is a massive reduction in government spending.

But given the current power inebriates in Washington, no one can believe that that needed cuts will be made. Under the circumstances of the grim global referendum on the dollar, made visible in the price of oil and gold, the creation of a new national health care entitlement borders on the lunatic.