Dick Morris: Coming next year: Obama's inflation

The Hill ^ | March 3, 2009 | Dick Morris

[2ndDivisionVet]

In the last five months, according to the Federal Reserve Board, the money supply in the United States has increased by 271 percent. It has almost tripled.

Have car sales tripled? Home purchases? Consumer spending? Corporate investment? Not only have they not tripled, they have all declined more sharply than they have since at least the recession of 1981-82, and perhaps since the Great Depression.

So where is the money? If it isn’t being spent, where is it?

It is being parked, squirreled away. Consumers are using it to pay down their credit card balances, pay off their mortgages, reduce their student loans, make the payments on the car sitting in their driveway — not the one in the dealer’s lot. Businesspeople are buying T-bills, investing the money and saving it. They aren’t spending, either.

But one day this recession — despite Obama’s best efforts — will end and things will begin to look up again. Then we can expect all of this money to come out of its parking space and get back on the highway of commerce. All at once. The inevitable result will be double-digit hyperinflation.

Since the spending and borrowing splurge is not confined to Washington, but is being mimicked all over the world, the inflation will not strike just one country but will be global in scope. The first global inflation in our history (except, perhaps, right after World Wars I and II), it will confront our policymakers with yet another unprecedented challenge and send them back, once more, to their economics texts. There, they will find that the only remedy for global inflation is global recession, a la Paul Volker. Having just emerged from a ruinous depression, nobody will be in the mood for more unemployment, but that is just what will have to happen to cool off the inflation and break the inflationary psychology that is likely to set in.

The point of this gloom and doom is that all this pain is entirely preventable. It will be caused by Obama’s excessive spending and trillion-dollar-plus deficits. This spending, of questionable utility in overcoming the current recession/depression, is so far out of line with what the economy can handle that it will do more harm than good when the inflation hits.

Proof that his spending will have little impact on the depression is the vast increase in money supply with no commensurate improvement in the economy. Providing money, via spending hikes or tax cuts, does not guarantee that the money will be spent. Tax cuts can be saved and spending increases, while surely spent once (on the initial project), can rapidly lose their multiplier effect as wage-earners on the government payroll bank their money just like those who get tax cuts will do. Getting out of this economic mess depends on consumer and business confidence, a faith that Obama is eroding with his looming tax increases as rapidly as he tries to kindle it with his excessive spending.

None of this should come as any news to Obama. He likely knows all this. But he is determined to pass his agenda of bigger government, nationalized healthcare and vastly greater spending even at the price of inflation and subsequent recession. He puts ideology first and the economy a distant second.

The stock market has figured out his priorities and is responding accordingly. One can only hope that voters also eventually realize what is going on.

[Red Dog #1]

“Inflation is a destroyer of wealth.”

Obama will love it, destroy wealth inflate away the national debt.

[kabar]

inflation will add to the national debt.

[Centurion2000]

Thanks for the start.

[Red Dog #1]

Check your economics text book. Inflation decreases the real cost of repaying a debt.

[muawiyah]

You're welcome. There are a gazillion boards out about this new stuff. Depending on the materials used and what the researchers are after they may have two dissimilar types of atoms being combined into "clusters" that appear to emulate yet a third element, and those "clusters" then form with others to form crystals.

Some researchers have built up strange substances never seen before by starting with a thin film of gold atoms (not molecules)~ apparantly there such things as gold molecules. The deal that makes gold so maleable is the large number of electrons in the outer bands. They use that band of electrons to facilitate the construction of "other stuff".

Some of the "super atoms" have been found among the molecules of similar material ~ e.g. aluminum.

Here's what to watch out for in your research ~ science fiction has always postulated things like Duraluminum (light weight metal tougher than steel), transparent or invisible aluminum, etc. LOOK AT THE SOURCE. Make sure you have a legitimate scientific or industrial product source.

I'm keeping my eyes open for a company that can produce some of this stuff cheaply in large quantities.

[kabar]

You may be paying the old debt back with cheaper dollars, but you will be piling up new debt in such areas as the entitlement programs that make up half of the annual federal budget. How big will the COLAs be for SS recipients? By 2030, one in 5 Americans will be 65 or older.

Inflation: the Hidden Wealth Destroyer and What To Do About It