Jim Grant's November 2014 speech at the Cato Institute

 

"What will futurity make of the [so-called] Ph.D. standard [that runs our world]?
Likely it will be even more baffled than we are. Imagine trying to explain the present-day arrangements to your 20-something grandchild a couple of decades hence - after the crash of, say, 2016, that wiped out the youngster's inheritance and provoked a cenral bank response so heavy-handed as to shatter the confidence even of Wall Street in the Federal reserve's methods...
I expect you'll wind up saying something like this:

"My generation gave former tenured economics professors discretionary authority to fabricate money and to fix interest rates.

We put the cart of asset prices before the horse of enterprise.

We entertained the fantasy that high asset prices made for prosperity, rather than the other way around.

We actually worked to foster inflation, which we called 'price stability' (this was on the eve of the hyperinflation of 2017).

We seem to have miscalculated."

- Jim Grant