Gotta love those inflationists! We enjoy getting in their faces now and then because their nutty ideas, particularly that inflation is worth worrying about at the moment, can only confuse and misdirect people who are struggling to sort out the facts for themselves. Imagine waiting…and waiting…and waiting for inflation to “break out,” as the inflationists have been doing all too patiently since 1991. That’s when the Fed put pedal to the metal to escape the drag of recession. At the time, virtually every monetarist in the land was predicting that a nasty inflationary spiral lay just ahead. All we got in the end was the kind of inflation that no one noticed, let alone complained about: asset inflation. Greenspan sealed his reputation as a bubblehead forever by finally noticing the bubble, although, to » Read the full article
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Europe Buys Time with the Vaguest Plan Yet
by Rick Ackerman on October 18, 2011 12:01 am GMT · 23 comments
So lame is Europe’s latest attempt at spin control that Americans could view it as comic relief from our own worries about the U.S. economy’s accelerating death spiral. Creating a global diversion was doubtless a goal of the exercise, which featured Sarkozy and Merkel, president and chancellor, respectively, of France and Germany, posing for the photo-op unveiling of a scheme – sorry, no details at this time – to put Greece and the rest of the PIIGS on sound financial footing. Never mind that France itself starts to look like a financial basket case if one scrutinizes their books too closely; or that the German people, if not yet their leaders, have lost their appetite for bailing out the rest of Europe. And never mind either that, rather than describing their supposed plan, Merkel and Sarkozy have merely promised to tell us more about it in the fullness of time – reportedly at a November meeting of Euroland’s potentates, wizards and feather merchants. To their dubious credit, and perhaps owing to an understandable desire to avoid the derision of the world, the two leaders did not refer to a “secret plan” when they deliberately left it under wraps; no, they alluded merely to “a plan, ” and we can only surmise that they were fearful of raising the public’s expectations by implying that something new or unexpected was about to be tried. Better instead to maintain and nurture the low-grade cynicism with which most of us have come to regard these announcements. That cynicism seems manageable, at least – presumably until market forces cause the whole shoddy edifice to crumble.
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