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If you look at the balance sheet, the US is heavily in debt. If you look at the income account - the amount of interest the US pays abroad - it is almost exactly equal to the amount of interest that it receives from abroad. American assets held abroad are earning a higher rate of return than foreign assets held here.

Milton Friedman

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Milton Friedman
Age: 94 †
Born: 1912
Born: July 31
Died: 2006
Died: November 16
Economist
Essayist
Statistician
University Teacher
Writer
Brooklyn
New York
Milton Fridman
Almost
Rate
Earning
Interest
Exactly
Assets
Balance
Account
Sheet
American
Pay
Foreign
Receives
Look
Equal
Held
Heavily
Looks
Return
Accounts
Abroad
Amount
Income
Pays
Higher
Debt
Sheets

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In a free society, it is hard for 'good' people to do 'good', but that is a small price to pay for making it hard for 'evil' people to do 'evil', especially since one man's good is another's evil
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Economic freedom is an essential requisite for political freedom. By enabling people to cooperate with one another without coercion or central direction, it reduces the area over which political power is exercised.
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Inflation is the one form of taxation that can be imposed without legislation.
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The problem is that, in a world of floating exchange rates, as Italy was before the euro, if one country is subjected to a shock which requires it to cut wages, it cannot do so with a modern kind of control and regulation system. It is much easier to do it by letting the exchange rate change. Only one price has to change, instead of many.
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No central banker would disagree with the proposition that inflation is primarily a monetary phenomenon. Not one of them will disagree that every inflation has been accompanied by a rapid increase in the quantity of money and every deflation by a decline in the quantity of money.
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The free market is not only a more efficient decision maker than even the wisest central planning body, but even more important, the free market keeps economic power widely dispersed.
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The history of mankind is the history of money losing value.
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The most unresolved problem of the day is precisely the problem that concerned the founders of this nation: how to limit the scope and power of government. Tyranny, restrictions on human freedom, come primarily from governmental restrictions that we ourselves have set up.
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If the only motive was to help people who could not afford education, advocates of government involvement would have simply proposed tuition subsidies.
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You can only make money if you buy a product, whatever it is - maybe a currency, maybe wheat and maybe something else - at a relatively low price and sell it at a higher price than you buy it at. There's no other way to make money.
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I would say that in this world, the greatest source of inequality has been special privileges granted by government.
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Economists may not know how to run the economy, but they know how to create shortages or gluts simply by regulating prices below the market, or artificially supporting them from above.
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Only a crisis—actual or perceived—produces real change. When that crisis occurs, the actions that are taken depend on the ideas that are lying around.
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The Great Depression in the United States, far from being a sign of the inherent instability of the private enterprise system, is a testament to how much harm can be done by mistakes on the part of a few men when they wield vast power over the monetary system of the country.
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Only government can take perfectly good paper, cover it with perfectly good ink and make the combination worthless.
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As a nation, we have been responsible for the murder of literally hundreds of thousands of people at home and abroad by fighting a war that should never have been started and can be won, if at all, only by converting the United States into a police state.
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Inflation is always and everywhere a monetary phenomenon.
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China's productive system draws upon the other East Asian countries to a great extent. The volume of trade is much larger than the net amount being exported from China. China needs substantial reserves to finance all that.
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What kind of society isn't structured on greed?
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The government doesn't have any money. The only power it has is to take from some and give to others.
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