Best post yet.
China's devaluation is one small sign of inflation---who knows? Maybe it's the first big sign.
But (and I'm no economist, which is probably a good thing) I've been working on a theory for about 10 years, namely that we haven't begun to pump the money supply up to where it has caught up to REAL productivity gains.
Traditional measurements of productivity used to go like this: you have a rotary phone selling for $40. Now a new phone comes along, dials faster, better audio, and it sells for $50. That's a productivity increase of more than 20%. (or, say, you can sell it for $30 but sell more, however you want to measure the traditional productivity increases of output per hour).
But here comes a cell phone. This isn't just a phone though. It's a camera, a calculator, a GPS, a game, a video device, a calorie counter, and on and on. So you can't just say it's productivity increase is x over a phone. You would have to add ALL the previous functions it now does and factor in THAT productivity. How much time, for example, do people spend working on planes because now they have iPad/laptop capability? How much business time do you spend in your car talking on your phone, how much do you save by not pulling over reading maps, etc?
In short, we may have had a phenomenal technological revolution that the "traditional" accounting measures haven't yet caught up to, and if so, the money supply has, in fact, lagged behind. Say it's been a $17 TRILLION increase over the past 10 years . . . .?