For the last six years, US financial markets have conspicuously suspended disbelief. If you keep getting new credit cards and maxing them out without paying them down, you’ll go bankrupt. Incredibly, Wall Street and Washington “economists,” blessed by a majority of academics, assure us that what inevitably leads to ruin for an individual leads to prosperity when followed by governments and central banks. One branch holds that government debt is the key to economic growth; the other branch holds that a central bank exchanging its own conjured-from-thin-air debt for that government debt is the answer. Either branch removes economics from the pretension that the field is a science. Almost as inapt is the reluctant concession by a few that it’s more an art. No, this economics is destined for the Weird and Tragically Deluded Cults bin with the Moonies and the Kool Aid guzzlers.

This is an excerpt. To read the full article, please click the link above.