The Biggest Lie in Economics | Peter St Onge

The Federal Reserve has destroyed 93 to 97 percent of the dollar's purchasing power since its creation, yet roughly two-thirds of Americans believe the Fed's job is to fight inflation. As Peter St Onge puts it, "the purpose of every central bank, including the Federal Reserve, is to create inflation." Before the Fed existed, the US had zero inflation for 170 years.

How Economics Got Corrupted

St Onge, who earned his economics PhD from McGill without ever hearing about Austrian economics, argues that the academic establishment systematically suppresses classical economics in favor of Keynesianism. The mechanism is straightforward: the Fed prints its own budget and can spend unlimited amounts hiring monetary economists and funding academic grants. An economist who writes a paper arguing the Fed destabilizes the economy will not receive future grants. "It's surprisingly cheap to corrupt an academic—$500, a thousand dollars would do it," St Onge says, especially for junior researchers. The payoff is enormous: controlling the leverage points that manage trillions of dollars of resources.