Jim Grant: The Fed Turned the Stock Market Into a 'Hall of Mirrors'

“Confoundingly to me, people have come to be quite accepting of the value attached by fiat to these pieces of paper we call currency,” says Jim Grant, who’s the editor of Grant’s Interest Rate Observer and the author of The Forgotten Depression: The Crash That Cured Itself. “Are prices meant to be imposed from on high, or discovered by individuals acting spontaneously in markets? The readers and viewers of Reason known the answer to that but they’re regrettably in the minority." Grant sat down with Reason magazine editor-in-chief Matt Welch on Tuesday to discuss the underlying causes of the recent market turbulence, why we don’t really “have interest rates anymore,” and how the classic jazz song “It’s Only a Paper Moon” provides a fitting metaphor for the equities market. Seven minutes. Shot by Jim Epstein and Anthony Fisher. Edited by Epstein. Got to http://reason.com/reasontv for downloadable versions and subscribe to Reason TV’s YouTube Channel to receive automatic updates when new stories go live.