Incumbents that engage in hyperinflation usually gain political benefit in the short run, and the short run is all they care about. The Weimar government was not punished at the polls.
Category: economics
Goldfellas
This is a spoof of Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein memo warning employees to avoid making big-ticket, high-profile purchases
Moral progress
I suggest we are not more virtuous. Consider the crimes of the twentieth century. Rather, we have strong states that reserve criminal conduct for themselves. When those states weaken, we see private crime on a scale typical of earlier of history, when they are strong, we see enormous crimes by states.
Social decay
Whatsoever the government sponsors, tends to turn bad. Since government funds are ill defended, grantsmanship based government funded memetic diseases will always outcompete truth based science, and similarly grantsmanship funded memetic diseases will always outcompete art based on beauty. Government funded art will rapidly become ugly and stupid. Government funded science will rapidly become untruthful and stupid, string theory as much as global warming theory.
Chinese GDP to surpass US by about 2016 or so
Meanwhile, however, the US government is engaged in a sufficiently determined attack on tax havens, having recently successfully pressured the Swiss to deny financial services to Americans, blissfully unaware of the increasing dependence of the American economy on entrepeneurial skills and knowledge mediated through such havens. Interpreting the golden goose as a parasite, as a challenge to their authority and a rejection of their superior wisdom, they prepare to slay the golden goose.
The vast majority of defaults were black and hispanic
Hat tip Steve Sailer who provides the breakdown of defaults. The proximate cause of the international crisis is that the US$, the international reserve currency, lost much credibility. The proximate cause of the US$ losing credibility was massive defaults by blacks and Hispanics, and the proximate cause of the massive defaults by blacks and Hispanics was affirmative action lending to people whom I could tell at a glance from twenty …
The government can inflate its way out of debt
Megan McCardle tells us You Can’t Inflate Your Way Out of Debt, which is dead wrong: Look, for example at the Wiemar republic.
“We may be seeing the beginning of the end of the recessionâ€
My prediction is for high unemployment, high inflation, or both.
Kaufman predicts soaring unemployment
as everything goes to hell, doubtless capitalism will be blamed, and Krugman and the rest will declare that they have been proven right – that all the bad things happening are proof that capitalism does not work and therefore they did not crush it enough.
British political prisoners.
Two british nazis, Simon Shappard and Stephen Whittle, were charged with writing heresy. They fled to the USA, but last month were forced back to Britain, where they have each been jailed for two years and two months for publishing thought crimes: They posted on their web site that Hitler did not exterminate the Jews, but that he should have.