Do you feel that the economy is as healthy as is being reported by mainstream media?

You know when people tell me that the economy is so strong and doing so well, and I understand there are certainly some construction going on and things have rebound in terms of prices of homes, I always have to ask them a question though. If they really believe that, why is a 1% interest rate increase such a big deal? Why would Ben Bernanke say that the economy couldn’t handle it?

Why are we so focused on just a .25%? I mean, ask yourselves is that really a strong fundamentally sound economy that can’t handle a 1% interest rate? I’m going to go on with something else, where I’m a little tough on people when they say, “Don’t worry about money printing. Don’t worry about all this borrowing. It really wasn’t that important anyway” and I go, “Really?” “Liars, Liars, Pants on Fire” and that’s what I say. “I know how I can prove it. If you really think that’s true, why don’t we go on ahead and just start printing a lot of money to fund things this country needs. Like, why don’t we rebuild every school that’s older than 25 years old? Certainly, wouldn’t that be a help, an investment in our education? Why don’t we just bond that, maybe that’s a few 100 billion or a few trillion, bond it and we’ll have the Fed just buy all those bonds with printed money? Who cares, right? There’s a lot of good things we could do for this country. We certainly need new infrastructure, new bridges. We certainly can use a tax cut–everybody could pay less taxes. No problem, we’ll just borrow that money and the Fed will print it. They’ll just buy the bonds to fund all of that. Are you ready to support that right now?” When I ask that of audiences when I do presentations, nobody raises their hands and that’s what tells me they know that printing money does have consequences. All this borrowing does have a problem, because they don’t support any more of it. In fact, they don’t support virtually any of it for hard assets, so to speak, like infrastructure and so forth. They only support it to support our bubbles, because they know we desperately need that money printed to support our bubbles, and if we don’t have it the bubbles are popping. They know that printed money is bad. They know it’s a really long-term devastating thing for the economy. They just don’t want to admit it, because they know it’s so important for keeping up the bubbles. “Liars, liars, pants on fire,” that’s what I say.