Richard Werner's Princes of the Yen, both the 2003 book and the 2014 documentary, delivers something central banks prefer you never piece together: they manufacture credit to reshape economies, and they do it deliberately, without democratic mandate. Werner spent years inside the Bank of Japan and documented how BoJ governors used "window guidance" from the 1980s onward to direct commercial bank lending, first into productive sectors, then into asset speculation, creating the bubble, then deliberately strangling credit to burst it. The resulting 1990s depression gave Tokyo's bureaucratic elite the political leverage to ram through deregulation and structural reforms the public had rejected at the ballot box. Crisis as policy tool. This is textbook credit expansion theory. New money conjured through the banking system distorts the capital structure, generating malinvestments that must eventually liquidate. Mises and Hayek mapped this mechanism decades before Werner observed it happen in real time in Tokyo. The documentary makes this accessible to anyone willing to sit with seventy minutes of uncomfortable institutional history. Central banks present themselves as neutral technocrats. Werner shows you the men, the meetings, the deliberate choices. The broader implication lands hard. Every major central bank operates with identical legal insulation from accountability. The Federal Reserve, the ECB, the BoE: none of them answer to you when they redirect credit, inflate asset prices, and then let the crash discipline the population into accepting reforms. Japan was/is a demonstration of the model working exactly as designed. youtube.com/watch?v=p5Ac7ap_…

At La Cabaña prison in 1959, Che Guevara presided over tribunals that executed somewhere between 156 and 550 men, many after trials lasting minutes. Appeals were theater. "Judicial evidence is an archaic bourgeois detail," he wrote, which is a convenient position when you are the one holding the rifle. The man despised markets with the same enthusiasm he despised due process. As head of Cuba's National Bank, he destroyed the peso, printing money and signing the new bills simply "Che" to show his contempt for the whole institution of sound currency. Cubans paid for this in bread lines. He built labor camps too. The UMAP camps, opened in 1965, held homosexuals, Jehovah's Witnesses, and anyone the regime labeled counter-revolutionary. Forced labor under armed guard. These people needed "moral correction". Leftists wear his face on a T-shirt, advertising a man who wanted to abolish the very commerce that printed the shirt. He called money a bourgeois disease. He loved the firing squad and hated the price system, which makes sense, because both let strangers coordinate without a commissar's permission. A killer. Economically illiterate. Incapable of reason. No wonder the left idolizes him.