I saw this comment over at a political blog today:
We are likely to see a weak GOP and a democratic party beset by infighting. Get ready for a decade of political chaos on top of economic chaos. There is no way to take even an educated guess of what will arise from the ashes.
Which, actually, might be the best thing for this country.
Seriously.
The news this weekend about frenzied shoppers KILLING A MAN in their lust to … what? … save $1.50 on a Wiimote?
We have learned nothing from The Crash yet. Which means that we aren’t yet going to change our behavior.
It’s like operant conditioning. If you don’t give the monkey the shock, it won’t stop pushing the lever that used to deliver it hits of cocaine. Well, the government has been working overtime to try to stave off that shock. Which is all well & good – nobody likes getting high-voltage shocks – but my concern is that if we don’t in some way start changing our mindless consumerist behavior, the eventual shock is going to be much, much worse than what we’ve got coming in the next year or so, if we just stand & take our medicine.
I”m looking at the long-term effects of jamming this much cash into our economy – at last count, we’re getting up near $10 TRILLION in so-called “bailout” cash. Yeah, for the next year or so, we’re going to cushion the comedown from the last 8 (or 28, really) years of borrowing & spending like drunken sailors while not really producing anything.
The problem is that long-term, the effect of waving a magic wand to create that much cash is going to be … well, you’re familiar with supply & demand, right? When supply exceeds demand, value goes down.
So when an extra 10 trillion of the commodity known as “dollars” gets jammed into the system … what does that mean for the value of the dollar?
Buy gold, folks. Gold, silver, or arable land. I’d like to think that there’s some greater plan for doing these crazy macroeconomic borrowing policies in the short term & fixing them in the mid-term, but I just don’t see it happening yet.