David Morgan: Could you give us your personal assessment on the current economic landscape?

Mark Thornton: Well, I guess we’re at the point in history that I always thought was going to occur. Ever since I was a young man, very young man, I realized through study that going off the gold standard was a big mistake. That was really my first interest in economics and it just expanded outward from there and I found the Austrian School and got involved with the Mises Institute and went on and got my graduate degree.

I have been studying this issue ever since. The only thing that has really surprised me about this is that it has taken so long to get to this place in time and by this place, I mean a world in which fiat money is the sole circulating means of exchange and where central banks are engaged in a world currency war, trying to manipulate the value of their currencies downward in a simultaneous battle across the globe. But in particular the United States, the European Central Bank, Japan, and China and then of course many other countries engaged in the war in a defensive status where countries like Switzerland and Norway are pumping up their money supplies and engaged in quantitative easing in order to stabilize the exchange value of their currency.

So here in the United States, the ramifications of that are fairly easy to see that the Federal Reserve has manipulated markets to an extreme and to a level that I never thought they were going to be willing to go to. But they’ve manipulated stock markets and bond markets have created bubbles throughout the economy in the US in terms of, of course, the stock market reaching all-time high levels, bond markets reaching all-time high levels, junk bond yields down to historically low levels, rising real estate prices, rising art prices.

It’s truly remarkable to the extent that they’ve been able to engineer this. They’ve taken so many unprecedented measures. I really never thought that central bankers would go to this extreme but they’ve done it. So right now, what we’re looking at is a worldwide currency war. We’re looking at real estate housing bubbles all around the planet, whether it’s Canada, in Asia, in Manhattan, in Washington DC.

There are these housing bubbles and real estate bubbles rising to the extreme. Then one of the things that I like to follow as an indicator is the Skyscraper Index. The Skyscraper Curse is the eerie correlation of the building of record setting skyscrapers and world economic crises.

Basically going around the planet, we see all sorts of huge skyscrapers being built and even more recently, China and Saudi Arabia have announced plans to build worldwide record-setting skyscrapers. So that’s the way I view it, that we’re in unprecedented territory at this point and time in terms of markets....