Paul Craig Roberts: Everything Is Totally Manipulated

Jason Burack of Wall St for Main St interviewed former assistant US Treasury Secretary under President Reagan, former Associate Editor of the Wall Street Journal and distinguished academic and author, Dr. Paul Craig Roberts http://www.paulcraigroberts.org/. Paul also served on many boards of directors in the private sector.

During this 40 minute interview, Jason starts off by asking Paul about the US' foreign policy and if it got more aggressive after the Soviet Union collapsed.

Dr. Roberts talks about the Wolfowitz Doctrine from the Neo-Cons and how US foreign policy has become even more aggressive towards war and expansion after the Soviet Union collapsed.

Jason and Dr. Roberts discuss the military industrial complex and Dr. Roberts talks about how and why the Soviet Union fell.

Dr. Roberts says production managers in the Soviet Union focused on beating quotas but they did not produce anything consumers wanted, there was enormous misallocation of capital and resources there and there were not any reliable pricing mechanisms for businesses and entrepreneurs to produce goods and services consumers wanted.

Next, Jason asks Paul about what's going on in the real economy in the US and if there's inflation.

Dr. Roberts talks about all the inflation in food, energy, etc and how the CPI was changed by politicians so cost of living adjustments (COLA) would not have to be paid out to more social security recipients.

Jason and Dr. Roberts talk about the ways the BLS continues to change the CPI and under report inflation using hedonics.

Dr. Roberts also talks about how the US economy is not creating really any full time high paying jobs. Dr. Roberts talks about offshoring/outsourcing and why he thinks the US is quickly becoming a 2rd world economy while asset bubbles are created with fiat money.

Jason and Dr. Roberts discuss restaurants and retails stores closing and why that means the economy is not recovering. Paul says the US consumer lacks any savings or discretionary income to spend money.

Finally, to wrap up the interview, Jason asks Dr. Roberts how long he thinks this asset price inflation, QE, backdoor bailouts, currency wars and the real economy in the US contracting can last while politicians, Wall St and large corporations are pure rent seekers and maintain the narrative in the mainstream media that the economy continues to improve.

Dr. Paul Craig Roberts Assistant Secretary of the US Treasury Dr. Paul Craig Roberts has had careers in scholarship and academia, journalism, public service, and business. He is chairman of The Institute for Political Economy. Dr. Roberts was awarded the Treasury Department’s Meritorious Service Award for “his outstanding contributions to the formulation of United States economic policy.” In 1987 the French government recognized him as “the artisan of a renewal in economic science and policy after half a century of state interventionism” and inducted him into the Legion of Honor. Dr. Roberts has held academic appointments at Virginia Tech, Tulane University, University of New Mexico, Stanford University where he was Senior Research Fellow in the Hoover Institution, George Mason University where he had a joint appointment as professor of economics and professor of business administration, and Georgetown University where he held the William E. Simon Chair in Political Economy in the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

 He has contributed chapters to numerous books and has published many articles in journals of scholarship, including the Journal of Political Economy, Oxford Economic Papers, Journal of Law and Economics, Studies in Banking and Finance, Journal of Monetary Economics, Public Choice, Classica et Mediaevalia, Ethics, Slavic Review, Soviet Studies, Cardoza Law Review, Rivista de Political Economica, and Zeitschrift fur Wirtschafspolitik. He has entries in the McGraw-Hill Encyclopedia of Economics and the New Palgrave Dictionary of Money and Finance. He has contributed to Commentary, The Public Interest, The National Interest, Policy Review, National Review, The Independent Review, Harper’s, the New York Times, The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times, Fortune, London Times, The Financial Times, TLS, The Spectator, The International Economy, Il Sole 24 Ore, Le Figaro, Liberation, and the Nihon Keizai Shimbun. He has testified before committees of Congress on 30 occasions. Dr. Roberts was associate editor and columnist for The Wall Street Journal and columnist for Business Week and the Scripps Howard News Service. He was a nationally syndicated columnist for Creators Syndicate in Los Angeles. In 1992 he received the Warren Brookes Award for Excellence in Journalism. In 1993 the Forbes Media Guide ranked him as one of the top seven journalists in the United States. President Reagan appointed Dr. Roberts Assistant Secretary of the Treasury for Economic Policy and he was confirmed in office by the U.S. Senate. From 1975 to 1978, Dr. Roberts served on the congressional staff where he drafted the Kemp-Roth bill and played a leading role in developing bipartisan support for a supply-side economic policy. After leaving the Treasury, he served as a consultant to the U.S. Department of Defense and the U.S. Department of Commerce.