"Easy Money" is Neither - Part II
Moneyball Book Review Analysis #8
On July 26, 2025, Forbes published a book review written by John Tamny of my book, The Moneyball Method. That review was also published on July 18, 2025, at RealClearMarkets.com. This brief essay will focus on a quote from the eleventh paragraph of the Forbes review:
Which requires readers to forget what central banks and monetary authorities are doing or have done, what they’ve printed and what they haven’t, so they can then concentrate on money in circulation as opposed to money created by central planners from the Commanding Heights. In thinking about this, readers will hopefully see that allowing for its myriad demerits care of powerfully flawed economic theory on the right (Milton Friedman, and countless others) and left (Paul Krugman, and countless others), the dollar facilitates exchange and investment around the world exactly because production itself is money.
As this series of essays breaks down the book review into digestible pieces, this article will examine the elements of the two long sentences above for individual investors: 1) The actions of government monetary authorities should be disregarded. 2) The theories of economists that support the central bankers should be dismissed. 3) Money is not stupid.
But who talks like this? And why? Reality – human survival is predicated on man’s capacity for reason. Causality – money in circulation is wealth produced and has not yet been consumed. From the book’s Introduction, that is radical: “it deals with the root causes and fundamentals of orderly financial markets.”
One aspect of orderly markets is the information superhighway of price discovery. That is caused by voluntary trade, is totally decentralized – and because of constant change and innovation, it must be. That is reality, as mentioned in Chapter Ten, “No one can plan this network and only a charlatan would want that power.”
Yet, power over prices is precisely what non-producers desire – including the price of money. But to acquire that power, they must rationalize their methods to the public: to correct “imbalances” in their “perfect competition” quest for “the common good.” How quaint. And how destructive, as Chapter Two relates,
Because it is impossible for State regulators to anticipate or keep pace with innovation, political influence becomes their currency, politicians become lobbyists and regulatory capture becomes business strategy. If prices are knowledge driven, dynamic, reliable and efficient, why is there a movement to degrade them? Because prices are objectively good.
And money isn’t stupid. To learn more, please click the link below:
https://www.amazon.com/Moneyball-Method-Middle-Class-Manifesto-Objective/dp/1696009111/
I wonder if part of it is financial writers have to write about something, so they speculate about how recent economic indicators might affect monetary policy and how monetary policy might affect asset prices. If you really could be aware of this information before other market participants, maybe you could make profitable trades based on central bank decisions. But you can make money speculating on anything if you know the future. Speculating on actual future earnings actually allocates capital based on merit rather than guessing what central banks will do. Now that cryptocurrencies and possibly similar technologies are an alternative to fiat money, I hope market participants will move to them to get away from this extra layer of complication that central bank policy adds.