Quick take: Monetary lunacy is alive and well. Insanity isn't going anywhere.

 Two quick and related observations for this morning.  First, the good news, such as it is.  It looks like the Senate will reject Judy Shelton for the Federal Reserve.  You may not have noticed this, amid all of the other political lunacy, but Trump tried to appoint a straight-up goldbug to the Fed.

The good news is that McConnell does not appear to have the votes to confirm the wacko goldbug for an appointment to set... monetary policy.  The bad news is that it was a close call.  In other words, this is now a part of our mainstream political debate.  Goldbuggery is back in the Overton window.

Next, if you are paying attention to financial markets, the price of... oy... bitcoin is way up again.  Back on The Unmutual Political Blog, I wrote a long series called "Bitcoin is Bullshit."  Fortunately, I wrote a lot of that series in word processing rather than just in the blog editor, so I didn't actually lose it when I wiped the slate clean!  I can recover that, and maybe I'll repost it.  Anyway, bitcoin is still bullshit.  Key observation:  a currency must be a stable store of value.  Otherwise, it isn't useful as currency, and bitcoin isn't a commodity useful for anything else, so it's just bullshit.

And the price is way back up.  Why?  Because people are going nuts on currency.  Goldbuggery, bitcoin buggery...  Yeah, the Senate rejected Shelton, but our financial system is still at risk of getting buggered by crazy people.  At least the bitcoin-bugs just drive themselves to financial loss every time the market collapses.  The goldbugs are the dangerous ones.  But, it's all part of the same thing.