Tuesday, December 06, 2011

PRINT! (Then what?)

All the King's horses and all the King's men getting on the inflation < deflation risk (which is true) and that inflation is easier to contain once unleashed than deflation (which may or may not be true). The party line has infiltrated the popular business press...so you know what that means.

In normal times it would be legitimate to worry about the consequences of money printing and outsize debts. But history tells us these are anything but normal times.

We teetered on the edge of this same precipice 80 years ago, in 1931. A succession of major European banks went bust. Bailing them out was beyond the resources of fiscally overstretched governments. Failure to agree on orderly debt reductions led to disorderly defaults, tariff wars, and a further worldwide collapse of production and employment.

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