Chris Leithner Interviews

Click the date to listen via YouTube.

8th December, 2008 — Spending/consumption vs savings/production; Loss of manufacturing jobs; Interest rates; Government discouraging savings and encourages debt; Inflation and the Consumer Price Index (CPI); Term deposit rates are lower than the CPI hence punishing savers; Negative gearing. [10m 20s]

4th February, 2009 — Government revenue-raising methods (tax, borrow, inflate); Money vs wealth; Spending/consumption is too high relative to savings/production; More government borrowing is a mistake; "Stimulus packages" don't stimulate but rather distort; Obama stimulus; Great Depression stimulus spending didn't work; Australian regulatory system is not as good as touted; Confidence vs underlying reality. [11m 49s]

9th March, 2009 — 'Quantitative easing' is a euphemism for government money printing which is legalised counterfeiting; Currency inflation doesn't produce actual wealth but rather redistributes existing wealth; The failures of currency inflation in Japan and Zimbabwe; Government seemingly favours debtors by maintaining price inflation; Nominal monetary increase vs real wealth increase; A high rate of price inflation encourages a spending spiral; How the spending-over-savings paradigm enriches the financial industry which produces nothing tangible; Relative strength of U.S. dollar; Relationship between fiat currency and war financing; Central bankers are unjustifiably venerated; Hyperinflation; The situation in Canada with regard to house prices; Every bank is technically bankrupt due to fractional reserve lending; Higher deposits required in old days. [25m 18s]

13th March, 2009 — Artificially suppressed interest rates; Stimulus spending is making the underlying problem worse; Banks are highly leveraged and vulnerable; Quality of credit is falling; Bad loans were made during the boom; Rudd increasing size of government faster than Whitlam; We are doing the economic equivalent of binge drinking to fix a hangover. [17m 0s]

13th May, 2009 — The federal budget overspends and is economically illiterate; Government has deceived the public on debt and spending; The budget makes no tough decisions like those made by Peter Walsh as Finance Minister in the late 1980s; The worst of the financial crisis is yet to occur; Private debt is a major problem in Australia; This recession is a re-run of the 1970s rather than 1930s; Savings and prudence will dig people out of this hole. [18m 46s]

5th October, 2009 — The 'Magazine Cover Index' and economic group-think; The mainstream economic "experts" got it wrong and shouldn't be take seriously; Reserve Bank of Australia governor Glenn Stevens' laughably bad predictions; Interest rate manipulation and suppression. [8m 10s]

7th October, 2009 — How the U.S. dollar became the world reserve currency; In 1971 the U.S. dollar became a fiat currency; The International Monetary Fund and the World Bank; Hard money vs fiat money; Middle East countries are moving to denominate oil trading in currencies other than the U.S. dollar; U.S. national debt and future liabilities; Marx was not right because fiat currency is socialism not capitalism. [13m 22s]

20th October, 2009 — How government-imposed banking regulations (eg. central banking, fractional reserves) and bank bailouts result in a redistribution of wealth from middle class taxpayers to rich bankers and other members of the ruling establishment. Plummeting savings rates caused by the superannuation moral hazard. [14m 9s]

28th October, 2009 — Government is the sole author of inflation; The Reserve Bank of Australia is a monopoly; Privatisation; Governments don't create jobs; Government causes most price rises; Income tax bracket creep; Stimulus spending is like binge drinking. [9m 52s]

9th November, 2009 — Westpac's Gail Kelly calls for savings but for wrong reasons; Savings leads to investment which leads to production which leads to prosperity. [4m 30s]

17th February, 2010 — Government is prematurely announcing victory with regard to the global financial crisis; U.S. debt ceiling increase to prevent default;  Bad debts have been swept under government rug; Greenback emissions are a bigger problem than greenhouse emissions; There is no need for unemployment because it is caused by government intervention. [10m 7s]

9th April, 2010 — Bank runs in Greece; Fractional reserve lending is legalised fraud; In Australia there is no minimum reserve requirement for banks; The origins and functions of the Bank of International Settlements (BIS); Artificially low interest rates causing global financial crisis; Western governments are in a debt crisis due to future social welfare liabilities; OECD countries are misleading about their debt levels; Margaret Thatcher didn't actually cut government spending in the UK; Derivatives. [17m 34s]

29th April, 2010 — U.S. Government Accountability Office; 12 U.S. Government bureaucracies are unauditable; Welfare spending will swamp the U.S. budget in the near future; The ratings agencies and their attitude to U.S. debt levels; Americans will have to choose between global military hegemony and the welfare state. [11m 22s]

20th May, 2010 — The global financial crisis is not over; Government hypocrisy and double standards; Speculators are a necessary evil; Real estate and investment bubbles in China due to 'funny money'; Australia's dependence on China; The importance of private savings to national sovereignty; The U.S. government is bankrupt because of future welfare state liabilities. [13m 15s]

23rd August, 2010 — The U.S. government has been bankrupt for a long time; The underlying problems of the global financial crisis were not eliminated but only swept under the rug and exacerbated; Paul Krugman is wrong; Consumption vs production; China is doing the same thing as the West; Social security in the U.S. has not worked; Government intervention has increased the price of medical services; Quantitative easing in the U.S.; Government changing the definition of unemployment to deceive public. [15m 47s]

21st October, 2010 — The International Monetary Fund's (IMF) erroneous predictions and recommendations; Interest rate suppression; Central banking is the socialist central planning of interest rates yet it is supported by people calling themselves free-marketeers; We need a true interest rate not a low interest rate; Democracy is sometimes two wolves and a lamb voting on what's for dinner; The U.S. Department of Defense is unauditable; We are stealing from future generations. [10m 16s]

2nd November, 2010 — Interest rates; Banks lend more out than what they have on deposit and its completely legal; The financial system is seemingly designed to reward debtors; The banking system in Australia is a cartel; Savings create wealth, not spending; The modern zeitgeist is to borrow and spend; What if house prices go down?; The importance of savings. [13m 47s]

24th November, 2010 — Irish banks passed government "stress tests" but are still in trouble; You can't solve a debt problem with more debt; The bank stress tests are deliberately weak in order to deceive; There is a fatal defect in the structure of modern banking; If you believe the government you're a bloody idiot; Governments are continually underwriting banks who cannot survive of their own accord; Privatised gains and socialised losses. [13m 20s]

5th April, 2011 — How government interferes with private transactions; Chris' background in Canada; the Austrian School of economics; How government caused the global financial crisis via the banking system; How the Reserve Bank of Australia's inflationary policies caused artificial asset booms; Why recessions are the necessary cure to the government-caused inflation/malinvestment sickness; Housing malinvestment in China caused by the Chinese government; Prosperity requires savings, investment and production being prioritised over consumption; the free-market solution to the U.S. depression of 1920/21. [38m 5s]

9th June, 2011 — Government solutions to recession (quantitative easing and stimulus spending) are creating a moral hazard that fuels bad behaviour; The myth of central banker omniscience; The central banking monopoly; The bailout of Greece and the European Central Bank; The U.S. debt ceiling; Higher interest rates are a savings incentive; Politicians are predators who exempt themselves from their own laws. [13m 29s]

27th June, 2011 — Chinese socialists are bailing out Western socialists; The global financial crisis has not been solved; Politicians deny debt problems to win votes; Hard currency vs government fiat currency. [10s 4s]

5th August, 2011 — We can't borrow and spend our way to prosperity; The U.S. government's unfunded liabilities; Governments aren't exempt from economic reality; Australian household debt; The Reserve Bank is encouraging debt by depressing interest rates. [5m 40s]

26th September, 2011 — The pernicious alliance of big government and big banks; Quantitative easing is confiscation by another name; Politicians are telling untruths to the public about debt; If recession is delayed people will suffer more down the track; Argentina's economic situation; Recession cleanses bad debts and allows a fresh start; Homogenising Europe economically has lead to problems; Australia is as heavily indebted as other countries when state and private debt is considered; Gold prices; Governments have overspent and need to tighten their belts. [14m 7s]

29th September, 2012 — Government intervention - not the rigours of the free market - is the cause of the financial mayhem on Wall Street that becomes economic crises on Main Street. The Global Financial Crisis shows that it is not 'capitalism' (Karl Marx's insult of choice) or 'extreme capitalism (Kevin Rudd's) that has failed but the 'mixed economy'. To stop these crises, we need to free the market and allow it to do its job. In a free society, no bank is so big or important that we shouldn't let it fail. [1hr 0m 37s]

11th October, 2013 — The U.S. national debt and budget deficit; The U.S. Republican Party talk about cutting spending but rarely do when in government; Both Republicans and Democrats want a big state; Bank bailouts benefit the establishment and hurt regular taxpayers; The U.S. government is defaulting on its debt by stealth via debasement of the currency; If a private company was run like government the people running it might go to prison; Government suppressing interest rates. [12m 2s]