12 Warning Signs of U.S. Hyperinflation

[vanlose kid]

^^

that works as long as they hold it in reserve, i.e. do not spend it into the (world) economy or try to dump it, right? if they lose faith in the USD as a reserve currency though...

what? the FED buys it back to burn at a discount with what?

*

[JackRiddler]

.

global scale
permeation of borders
number of independent factors
interdependencies
number of autonomous actors
reflexivities
awareness of reflexivities
disinformation and misinformation
gas clouds of ideology
lack of functioning paradigms
speed - of everything
variety of forms
sizes and amounts
technologies
ecological crisis
energy crisis
disaster potentials
existence of single world discourse and news delivery
awareness of criminal behavior
revolutions and upheavals

- most have been before, but all are now unprecedented in quality and quantity. Most of the differences to prior cases can be measured in exponentials. Of course, humans are still pretty much the same, so there's a lot we can know if we're humble.

Let's get a leg up on the faking experts and start by admitting we usually can know what happened, and even why it happned, but are usually clueless about what's likely to come next. First step, we acknowledge our cluelessness daily, then go back to trying to figure it all out.

Frauds and delusions in a relatively limited sector were leveraged into total global risk. Finance crashed. Capitalism failed. Reactions followed. Crisis continues. Class war and desperate moves clash with hesitations and terrors, real and imagined. Everything's related. All is wrong. Simplistic analogies to half-digested historical cases do not apply. Ideological rules of thumb do not apply. Most of this universe is dark matter and energy, including to the powerful. Only morons and criminals know exactly what to do. New disasters assured, but which, and in what order? They may not follow any of the morphologies of crises familiar to us from history. We may have to invent new names for them, in the end.

Sermon over.

.

[compared2what?]

Question: So.. as has been established, what is needed in order for hyperinflation to occur is lots and lots of paper money floating around. And I think we also know that the Fed has run the printing press at warp speed for years now, buying back their debt themselves, etc. The theory goes that as long as other nations don't start cashing in and the US doesn't have to repatriate the money that is 'out there' that things will be fine. Am I right so far? (seriously, am I?)

Basically. But it kind of misplaces the emphasis to say that they've been running the printing press at warp speed buying back their own debt themselves, etc.

They've mostly been buying bad private debt and holding it in reserve precisely so that other nations (and/or domestic creditors) won't cash it in. For example: Mortgage-backed securities. They'll take a loss on those when they sell them, at some point down the road. But that's precisely because it's not a simple currency swap or currency injection. Somewhere at the end of that convoluted paper-trail, there are tangible assets (ie -- the mortgaged properties) which have a real market value that's a lot lower than what it was leveraged for on paper.

I don't have time to fact-check the figures right now, so please bear with me if they're wrong. But as I recall, they've also bought back about $600 billion in treasury bonds and other government (ie -- agency) debt. I might be wrong about this, but my understanding is that when the bonds mature, they'll lose the difference between the interest rate at time-of-issue and the interest rate at time-of-redemption.

The additional currency reserves were used to finance some (but not all) of that activity, the point of which was to inject some liquid capital into insolvent or close-to-insolvent financial institutions, in order to prevent them from collapsing and taking everybody's savings with them. Thus, it did not increase the amount of real currency in circulation in the part of the economy you and I occupy. Rather, it ensured that there would be some.

I'm not sure what impact it had on credit lines in the market for volume-trade-by-financial-institution purposes. But since that does not, in fact, trickle down, it almost doesn't matter [ON EDIT: except] for the purposes of this discussion.

It matters very much for the purposes of the discussion we're not having when we talk about inflation, though. Because that's the problem. The new normal is that the market economy goes off and does its thing, but our boats no longer really get lifted by its rising tides when they rise (to whatever extent they ever did, which is debatable). They just sit on cinder blocks in the yard outside our mobile homes, rotting. (I mean "our boats.")

Anyway. The added currency didn't enter general circulation. It wasn't really currency, if you get right down to it. It was credit. (Which fiat currency also is, but that doesn't mean that all credit issued by the Fed is currency.)

.. so .. the question is this: If the Fed can just print money out of nothing can't it also just burn money if floods of it come roaring back from other nations?

As above, they didn't really print money. They created credit. They'll take a loss on it eventually, at which point they can do all kinds of things to reduce inflationary impact, if any, although there's no guarantee that they will.

I guess my point is that there are more considerations than just the ones we're acknowledging. That's all.

[compared2what?]

love this cause it's really hard to get across sometimes. same with the distinction between corporations and government. (both Krugman and Hudson, and others of course, still think in these terms. it's how things are sold: left hand puppet right hand puppet.)

cheers.

*

I don't understand what you're saying about Krugman and Hudson. They're macroeconomists, dealing with numbers that arise distinctly from the distinct sources from which they arise.

See? You've so totally confused me that I'm no longer making any sense at all. What do you mean?

[compared2what?]

if the fed, to fund QEs and what not is adding to the 3% (and they are printing, just as the Treasury is printing up, actual not digital, bonds to "sell" to the FED) and adding to it by feeding it into the economy) the amount added will determine the value of the overall amount of paper money in circulation. the more chips in the market place the less value each chip has. in my thinking. digital money doesn't really come into it. -- i may be wrong though.

just a thought. trying to work it out.

*

^^^

I don't think that's accurate, but now I'm confused. What's your source on the printing-money-and-bonds stuff? Because I need one.

[compared2what?]

The Fed is pumping money into the economy by purchasing securities (debt). It can remove money by the opposite maneuver, selling back the debt and simply decommissioning the currency itself, through actual paper burning or account deletion.

Selling back trillions in debt to all those willing buyers?

.

Eventually, yes. At a loss.

[compared2what?]

^^

that works as long as they hold it in reserve, i.e. do not spend it into the (world) economy or try to dump it, right? if they lose faith in the USD as a reserve currency though...

what? the FED buys it back to burn at a discount with what?

*

Okay. Clearly, I'm now just totally lost. If who holds what in reserve or loses faith in the USD as a reserve currency and dumps it? Who are the parties to these transactions, what are the mechanisms of transmission, and what global market forces are inducing them to act?

[JackRiddler]

The Fed is pumping money into the economy by purchasing securities (debt). It can remove money by the opposite maneuver, selling back the debt and simply decommissioning the currency itself, through actual paper burning or account deletion.

Selling back trillions in debt to all those willing buyers?

.

Eventually, yes. At a loss.

I'm aware. It was a rhetorical question, more or less. One question is, how much of a loss? And what will that mean? One answer for paper that the banksters originated is that mark-to-market rules have been suspended, so don't worry your little heads and/or beautiful minds thinking about it. An answer for T-bills might be that, well, there will be some level of interest rates at which buyers magically appear. And that will be covered by taxpayers or outright creation. Long as everyone who has a say is happy, it works. Wile E. Coyote can remain suspended above the canyon, forever.

.

Can any of you photoshop whizzes whip up the X-Files poster with the "I Want to Believe" slogan, except it's not a photo of UFOs but a portrait of Bernanke?

.

[gnosticheresy_2]

When the BRIC countries "dump" the dollar, who are they going to "dump" it to?

[Nordic]

Can any of you photoshop whizzes whip up the X-Files poster with the "I Want to Believe" slogan, except it's not a photo of UFOs but a portrait of Bernanke?

.

Hard to believe that doesn't already exist somewhere!

[vanlose kid]

love this cause it's really hard to get across sometimes. same with the distinction between corporations and government. (both Krugman and Hudson, and others of course, still think in these terms. it's how things are sold: left hand puppet right hand puppet.)

cheers.

*

I don't understand what you're saying about Krugman and Hudson. They're macroeconomists, dealing with numbers that arise distinctly from the distinct sources from which they arise.

See? You've so totally confused me that I'm no longer making any sense at all. What do you mean?

what i'm saying re Krugman and Hudson is that they speak and write in terms of governments being independent and distinct from the financial powers within their countries. it's the "old" paradigm if you will. in Inside Job Soros drew an analogy re the economy based on a super tanker. that supertankers are built with compartments to prevent the sloshing oil from capsizing the ship. he said the "compartments" of the economy had been likewise lifted.

drawing on that analogy i'd say the separation(s) between Wall St and the gov are lifted. they are non-existent. so any "regulation" (and this has been borne out) is for the benefit of Wall St. someone else in the same movie said "we have a Wall St. government". that fits descriptively. another way of putting it would be to say "we have no government" or "Wall St. is the government".

as for Michael Hudson: he, along with Ellen Brown, seems to think that hyperinflation is a possibility. Ellen Brown dug up a different theory on what hyperinflation is: citing Schacht and using Zimbabwe as an example. none of them say: this is a certainty. and if you thought that i was saying it i can only say i haven't been. i don't know what's going to happen. i'm just interested in talking about what might happen.

re Krugman: his solutions to a certain set of problems are sound (as far as statist solutions go: the Obama or the GOV can and ought to do something). as you yourself say: you, Krugman and Hitler are in agreement. the thing is there is no state. or Wall St. is the state. so the solutions will not be forthcoming. that he speaks as if there is a separation between the two and that something can be done at this point in time is his call (unless of course he's only talking theoretically for purposes of education). he's way smarter than me. maybe he can see something i can't. maybe you can too.

re the non-separation of Wall St. and the government i think the way the Chinese among others speak to the issue re QE etc., is more accurate. they never say Wall St. is waging economic warfare but that the US is (and not on behalf of Wall St.). they, from what i've read, don't make that distinction: i.e. between the US gov and Wall St. which is to say that the US is as much of a state capitalist system as China is. any "regulation" is for show. the aims of the US gov and Wall St. are identical.

that's why i responded as i did to Stephens remark in response to something JR wrote. which you left out when quoting but here it is:

Stephen Morgan wrote:

JackRiddler wrote:
You deserve one DING!

This was a big thought for me today: All the examples of hyperinflation I can think of involved speculative attacks from without by speculators [which one could argue was what happened to Zimbabwe, i.e. not the "classical Weimar scenario as we know it from "economic history" but the Schacht version] with monetarist religion who either think a nation's too far into debt or hate its policies. It's not an internal strategy for plunder. It's a means of punishing (and profiting from) countries perceived to have failed or to be on an undesirable course.

I think that's a false distinction between external and internal. Distinctions such as national borders only apply to the likes of us, not the sort of people who can devalue national currencies just out of spite or greed.

...

the TBTF banks and financial institutions are the gov but they are also global. they are based everywhere. if e.g. people at AIG had no problem running their "own" corporation into the ground to make a profit i don't see why they'd have a problem running the US (just another corporation at this point) into the ground for the exact same reasons: profit. momma, apple pie and the red white and blue won't stop them.

*

[JackRiddler]

When the BRIC countries "dump" the dollar, who are they going to "dump" it to?

You know, they've thought of that. Otherwise the years since, say, the Iraq invasion might have looked very, very different.

I've also thought of it, but strangely BRIC and EU have yet to call me about the proposal I made in a post as an anonymous user name on some obscure message board, here:
viewtopic.php?f=8&t=21495&p=367505#p367537

It was prompted by this:

http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/china/2010 ... 599087.htm

Foreign and Military Affairs

China, Russia quit dollar
By Su Qiang and Li Xiaokun (China Daily)

Updated: 2010-11-24 08:02



Premier Wen Jiabao shakes hands with his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin on a visit to St. Petersburg on Tuesday.ALEXEY DRUZHININ / AFP

St. Petersburg, Russia - China and Russia have decided to renounce the US dollar and resort to using their own currencies for bilateral trade, Premier Wen Jiabao and his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin announced late on Tuesday. Chinese experts said the move reflected closer relations between Beijing and Moscow and is not aimed at challenging the dollar, but to protect their domestic economies.

"About trade settlement, we have decided to use our own currencies," Putin said at a joint news conference with Wen in St. Petersburg. The two countries were accustomed to using other currencies, especially the dollar, for bilateral trade. Since the financial crisis, however, high-ranking officials on both sides began to explore other possibilities.

The yuan has now started trading against the Russian rouble in the Chinese interbank market, while the renminbi will soon be allowed to trade against the rouble in Russia, Putin said. "That has forged an important step in bilateral trade and it is a result of the consolidated financial systems of world countries," he said.

Putin made his remarks after a meeting with Wen. They also officiated at a signing ceremony for 12 documents, including energy cooperation. The documents covered cooperation on aviation, railroad construction, customs, protecting intellectual property, culture and a joint communiqu. Details of the documents have yet to be released.

SNIP

And this:

Much Ado About Nothing: China, Russia Drop Dollar In Bilateral Trade
http://www.zerohedge.com/article/much-a ... eral-trade

Somehow the China Daily story we pointed out yesterday morning that China and Russia are expanding their trading terms and will conduct all bilateral trade exclusively in local currencies, thus dropping the dollar as an intermediary, is only today starting to make the rounds. Alas, this story is nothing but more posturing for several reasons: Bloomberg notes: "China and Russia will drop the U.S. dollar for bilateral trade and use their own currencies for settlement, China Daily reported, citing Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao and Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin." Oddly enough this is an identical overture from June 2009: yet very little has happened in terms of actual dollar lock out since then. Note the following story from June 17, 2009: "The leaders of Russia and China agreed to expand use of the ruble and yuan in bilateral trade to lessen dependence on the U.S. dollar a day after they took part in the first summit of the so-called BRIC countries." And judging by the market's reaction, and the dollar resurgence overnight it appears that everyone has read through this as just posturing. Furthermore, keep in mind that Russia was not even a top 10 trading counterparty of China in 2010. If China does the same with any of its top 10 partners then there may be a reason to worry. For now, China is merely testing the waters, and has absolutely no intent on isolating the US, nor making its nearly $3 trillion US FX reserves lose a double digit percentage of their value overnight.

At which point I produced my non-historic, not quite earth-shaking proposal addressed to no one in particular:

No one wants to do this overnight if they can avoid it. Most "events" are markers or culminations of ongoing developments. I think this is a big signal. It goes beyond what they announced last year. The timing comes as the US crisis looks to intensify, after the G20 slap-down for US dollar policy, and with a round of economy-crushing austerity imminent in the new Congress. As to the volume of trade involved, may I remind that Russia is the number one oil producer, and China the future number one oil consumer? And oh look, they share the world's second-longest border. Obviously there is much room for growth between them. The news splash of two giants coming to a small agreement is significant in a context where more and more of these bilateral currency arrangements are announced.

As the US crisis manifests again, there is incentive to set up an anti-dollar, and it will be if the powers involved can understand their mutual interest and work it out politically. Here's a scenario: BRIC and EU can establish a weighted basket of their own currencies fixed relative to each other (or floating within ranges a la Bretton Woods) while floating freely against the US dollar and commodities. A transaction system would allow for trade accounts among participating nations to be settled via this "Dollar for International Trade." Those accumulating DITs could redeem them in any of the participating currencies. Once the oil producers agreed to also price in DITs (as they already do in euros or other currencies under bilateral agreements), it would be more solid than the dollar. To start it off, participants could convert half of their central bank and sovereign fund holdings of dollars into DITs and use these for trade amongst them. To do that, understand, they do not sell their dollar reserves, which would be like a war. Rather, it's a bookkeeping conversion: One-half of dollar holdings are redenominated as DITs and allowed to float against the US dollar. If the Chinese holdings of 3 trillion US dollars are converted to half dollars and half DITs, they are no longer endangered, because a fall in DIT is a rise in the dollar, and vice-versa. Rather, they have 1.5 trillion DITs to go invest and spend in BRIC and EU, which is already the majority of the world's economy.

That was a scenario, true, and a presidents' meeting of Russia and China is a ways away from an agreement between EU and all of BRIC. But crisis accelerates moves that otherwise take decades of planning. The elements for the above are actually all in place. What you're going to see regardless is more and more of these bilateral and regional agreements doing away with the middleman, or in this case, the middle currency.

As for this being bad, presumably meaning for the US: Whether "we" are headed in a downward spiral is up to us. It's up to us to reject the politics of fear, permanent war, austerity and concentration of all wealth in the fewest and most corrupt hands. A better future is among our choices - and among other things the end of the US dollar as world currency and, related to that, the end of US empire are vital elements of a better future for the American people, assuming that also involves a much larger transformation.

.

[Nordic]

[quote][/quote]

[Pazdispenser]

As usual, Im a week late and a dollar short (so to speak) coming to this thread.

c2w, I was quite taken aback (but, of course, that is probably because I have put you on such a high pedestal) that you would quote US govt statistics in making some points way back at the beginning of this thread. Long before I ever had cause to find Mr. Wells' musings to support an evolving worldview, I intuited that CPI was shite. Sure enough, the current formula (I like to call it "solve for 2.5%") doesnt include food or energy. In the mid naughts, real estate was removed. When home prices tanked, housing was reintroduced.

I was also taken aback that the discussion would veer so quickly into "Glenn Beck said it? It must be false". Do I really need to bring up the possibility that the likes of Mr Beck are so effective because they will wrap a nugget of truth (in this case, wrt the Fed) in huge gobs of dis/misinformation (or perhaps a sweet crunchy coating surrounding a turd; I digress)? Those that listen to him are utterly confused and ineffective; those that tune him out, lump the element of truth with all things crap. Mission Accomplished.

Then there was the "hell with the top 10%" eddy in the stream. People. There are less than one million people worldwide who are driving and benefiting from this ponzi scheme**. They are the "top .001%" (in the US alone [they are, of course, an even smaller % of the pop globally]) That .001% is more than happy to see the rest of us 99.999% bickering and blaming each other. How much energy must be wasted justifying a teacher's salary ffs?

More than anything though, I can tell you that I have been amazed by the certitude displayed by so many presenting their theories in this thread. As someone whose professional success depends on making heads or tails of this subject (with a gold coin c2w), the more I read (and it has been total immersion lately), the less grounded I feel in making an assessment. Like shamus, I had been leaning toward HI. My current perspective is that the global economic system is much like a rotary mechanism (think washing machine). When tightly bound, and operating within spec, everything spins in an efficient structured fashion. But imagine a washing machine tank and motor without its casing. Now imagine that machine with a load of sheets going out of balance. It is eventually going to fly off in one direction or another. Can you predict which way it will spin out?

After nine pages, the thread weaved its way henceforth:

.

global scale
permeation of borders
number of independent factors
interdependencies
number of autonomous actors
reflexivities
awareness of reflexivities
disinformation and misinformation
gas clouds of ideology
lack of functioning paradigms
speed - of everything
variety of forms
sizes and amounts
technologies
ecological crisis
energy crisis
disaster potentials
existence of single world discourse and news delivery
awareness of criminal behavior
revolutions and upheavals

- most have been before, but all are now unprecedented in quality and quantity. Most of the differences to prior cases can be measured in exponentials. Of course, humans are still pretty much the same, so there's a lot we can know if we're humble.

Let's get a leg up on the faking experts and start by admitting we usually can know what happened, and even why it happned, but are usually clueless about what's likely to come next. First step, we acknowledge our cluelessness daily, then go back to trying to figure it all out.

Frauds and delusions in a relatively limited sector were leveraged into total global risk. Finance crashed. Capitalism failed. Reactions followed. Crisis continues. Class war and desperate moves clash with hesitations and terrors, real and imagined. Everything's related. All is wrong. Simplistic analogies to half-digested historical cases do not apply. Ideological rules of thumb do not apply. Most of this universe is dark matter and energy, including to the powerful. Only morons and criminals know exactly what to do. New disasters assured, but which, and in what order? They may not follow any of the morphologies of crises familiar to us from history. We may have to invent new names for them, in the end.

Sermon over.

.

Amen.

_____
** There are many more than 1M people currently benefiting from the system. I am referencing those that drive and thus ultimately benefit.

[compared2what?]

love this cause it's really hard to get across sometimes. same with the distinction between corporations and government. (both Krugman and Hudson, and others of course, still think in these terms. it's how things are sold: left hand puppet right hand puppet.)

cheers.

*

I don't understand what you're saying about Krugman and Hudson. They're macroeconomists, dealing with numbers that arise distinctly from the distinct sources from which they arise.

See? You've so totally confused me that I'm no longer making any sense at all. What do you mean?

what i'm saying re Krugman and Hudson is that they speak and write in terms of governments being independent and distinct from the financial powers within their countries. it's the "old" paradigm if you will. in Inside Job Soros drew an analogy re the economy based on a super tanker. that supertankers are built with compartments to prevent the sloshing oil from capsizing the ship. he said the "compartments" of the economy had been likewise lifted.

drawing on that analogy i'd say the separation(s) between Wall St and the gov are lifted. they are non-existent. so any "regulation" (and this has been borne out) is for the benefit of Wall St. someone else in the same movie said "we have a Wall St. government". that fits descriptively. another way of putting it would be to say "we have no government" or "Wall St. is the government".

as for Michael Hudson: he, along with Ellen Brown, seems to think that hyperinflation is a possibility. Ellen Brown dug up a different theory on what hyperinflation is: citing Schacht and using Zimbabwe as an example. none of them say: this is a certainty. and if you thought that i was saying it i can only say i haven't been. i don't know what's going to happen. i'm just interested in talking about what might happen.

re Krugman: his solutions to a certain set of problems are sound (as far as statist solutions go: the Obama or the GOV can and ought to do something). as you yourself say: you, Krugman and Hitler are in agreement. the thing is there is no state. or Wall St. is the state. so the solutions will not be forthcoming. that he speaks as if there is a separation between the two and that something can be done at this point in time is his call (unless of course he's only talking theoretically for purposes of education). he's way smarter than me. maybe he can see something i can't. maybe you can too.

My impression has always been that Krugman is under no illusions wrt who's calling the shots. He called the housing bubble and subsequent collapse years ahead of everyone else; then after everyone caught up with him, almost immediately began lobbying very, very hard, long and loudly for a much bigger and more populist stimulus package than Obama ended up passing right up to the finish line; then, IIRC, said more or less explicitly on his blog that it was going to be hell for decades and that he was in a state of despair thinking about it; and then went back to making the distinctions that he does because there actually still is a separation between the state and Wall street, and it's not yet a purely technical one.

I mean, this is a barely functioning democracy, but it still is one. And indeed, even if it was in the shape that Egypt was, there's always hope as long as there's some medium for freedom of expression and dissent. You could call what he does educating his readers, I suppose. Or you could call it informing them. Whatever the case, I personally wouldn't wish a person with his particular skill sets to use them any differently than he does. Because while his readers (or "we, the people," depending on your national perspective) are definitely not responsible for causing the democratic dysfunction, if it's going to get fixed at all, we are responsible for fixing it. By default.

And if there's one single solitary thing that any population that wants to govern itself has to have, it is: an informed understanding of the situation they're seeking to change.

Have you ever read It Can't Happen Here, by any chance?

Right before the end, Sinclair Lewis sets up the last couple of bits of action with a fast-forward, explaining that the popular resistance quickly became both popular and militarily successful enough to be in the game, but that since then, things have essentially been at an impasse, in this little passage here:

But there the revolt halted, because in the America, which had so warmly praised itself for its "widespread popular free education," there had been so very little education, widespread, popular, free, or anything else, that most people did not know what they wanted--indeed knew about so few things to want at all.

There had been plenty of schoolrooms; there had been lacking only literate teachers and eager pupils and school boards who regarded teaching as a profession worthy of as much honor and pay as insurance-selling or embalming or waiting on table. Most Americans had learned in school that God had supplanted the Jews as chosen people by the Americans, and this time done the job much better, so that we were the richest, kindest, and cleverest nation living; that depressions were but passing headaches and that labor unions must not concern themselves with anything except higher wages and shorter hours and, above all, must not set up an ugly class struggle by combining politically; that, though foreigners tried to make a bogus mystery of them, politics were really so simple that any village attorney or any clerk in the office of a metropolitan sheriff was quite adequately trained for them; and that if John D. Rockefeller or Henry Ford had set his mind to it, he could have become the most distinguished statesman, composer, physicist, or poet in the land.

Even two-and-half years of despotism had not yet taught most electors humility, nor taught them much of anything except that it was unpleasant to be arrested too often.

So, after the first gay eruption of rioting, the revolt slowed up. Neither the Corpos nor many of their opponents knew enough to formulate a clear, sure theory of self-government, or irresistibly resolve to engage in the sore labor of fitting themselves for freedom. . . . Even yet, after Windrip, most of the easy-going descendants of the wisecracking Benjamin Franklin had not learned that Patrick Henry's "Give me liberty or give me death" meant anything more than a high-school yell or a cigarette slogan.

I often fear that's where we're going to end up. So I don't regard it as a black mark on Krugman's record either that he hasn't conceded the game before it's really been lost or that he still uses his little acre of spectacular terrain for something as quaintly undramatic as educational purposes . If enough of his readers responded by thinking: (a) "Harumph. There sure wouldn't be no separation between Wall Street and the federal government if we had anything to say about it"; and (b) "Hey, wait, we do have something to say about it!" it might not be such a foregone conclusion.

re the non-separation of Wall St. and the government i think the way the Chinese among others speak to the issue re QE etc., is more accurate. they never say Wall St. is waging economic warfare but that the US is (and not on behalf of Wall St.). they, from what i've read, don't make that distinction: i.e. between the US gov and Wall St. which is to say that the US is as much of a state capitalist system as China is. any "regulation" is for show. the aims of the US gov and Wall St. are identical.

that's why i responded as i did to Stephens remark in response to something JR wrote. which you left out when quoting but here it is:

Stephen Morgan wrote:

JackRiddler wrote:
You deserve one DING!

This was a big thought for me today: All the examples of hyperinflation I can think of involved speculative attacks from without by speculators [which one could argue was what happened to Zimbabwe, i.e. not the "classical Weimar scenario as we know it from "economic history" but the Schacht version] with monetarist religion who either think a nation's too far into debt or hate its policies. It's not an internal strategy for plunder. It's a means of punishing (and profiting from) countries perceived to have failed or to be on an undesirable course.

I think that's a false distinction between external and internal. Distinctions such as national borders only apply to the likes of us, not the sort of people who can devalue national currencies just out of spite or greed.

...

the TBTF banks and financial institutions are the gov but they are also global. they are based everywhere. if e.g. people at AIG had no problem running their "own" corporation into the ground to make a profit i don't see why they'd have a problem running the US (just another corporation at this point) into the ground for the exact same reasons: profit. momma, apple pie and the red white and blue won't stop them.

*

I'm sorry if I unintentionally quoted you out of context by excising that. But if I did, it was so unintentional that I must still be missing your point, because I don't see how it sheds any light on what I was asking about. Of course the Chinese don't make a distinction between the U.S. government and Wall Street. There is none that's much worth considering from their perspective. That doesn't mean that there isn't one from mine, however. Or that I don't have an excellent reason to remain ever-mindful in my detailed consideration of exactly in what it consists. Because whether there's ever a game-changer in the form of either a real coup or a real revolution or not, to me, personally, it could only ever potentially be my government (in the of-me-by-me-for-me sense of the word) as long as I kept doing that.

I'm not talking about foolishly optimistic fantasies here. I just mean that I don't think it's any less important to know and understand in some detail what your preferred political options are when you don't have any than it is when the world's your oyster. Know what I mean?