AROUND THE WEB

History may not always repeat itself, but failure to pay attention is a fool's errand. Here's worthwhile recent blurb from http://dailyspeculations.com/.

It is time honored policy for governments to run up huge debt, then via inflation to pay back that debt in pennies to the dollar or not at all. The most extreme example would be Wiemar republic in the 20s, but there are devaluations all the time, witness Argentina. It is an easy and quiet destruction of wealth of the citizenry by their government. Keynes wrote about it. Though eventually it will work in the US, there must be frustration it is taking so long here. There must be other forces at work holding up the dollar I would call these the positive affects, like the production, innovation, demand for US currency for trade, a slowing of credit growth (second order affect). Amazingly for the time being these forces counter-act a destructive currency policy and there is a stand-off.

Stefan Jovanovich writes:

I think anonymous' point needs further support. Governments have not, in fact, "paid back" debt using inflated currencies. That is one of Keynes' historical fantasies. The debt was simply defaulted. After the new currency was refloated, some of the former debtholders (but never all or even a majority) are lucky/influential enough to be "repaid" by having their old debt instruments swapped for new IOUs using the new "sound" currency; but actual payments that extinguish the debt are never made for the simple reason that the government had no reserves in the old currency and no political ability to make one grand final payment in full. This may seem like a distinction without a difference, but it is not. Default allows the governments to wipe out all the other promises made that were not secured by indentures (pensions, social service payments, subsidies) in the name of "reform". If those obligations had, in fact, been "paid back" in the inflated legal tender, the claimants would at least have gotten old "dollars" that were worth new pennies; what, in fact, happens is that they get nothing.

The rise of the National Socialists can be directly tied to the fact that the currency reform after the hyperinflation left all the old Bismarck safety net promises in default. Hitler's most successful campaign promise was that he would restore those vanished pensions at full value (one can find parallels with the American Progressives' promise throughout the last third of the 19th century and all the times thereafter to assure farmers that they would receive "par" for their crop payments. The just-passed farm bill is a legacy of that toxic doctrine of equalism.)