I fucking knew it. Can you smell the austerity? "Best thing for them, really," says Hannibal Bernanke, "their therapy was going nowhere."
The bummer for me: stagflation does little to hasten the much-needed fall of the Fed. They can actually drag that one out, and keep us all firmly hitched to the Fed system's wagon in the process, by actually shrinking the currency in circulation, while propping up the banks when ordinary people are forced to default. Bernanke is trying to do artificially what sound competing currencies would accomplish naturally (assuming NOBODY is too big to fail, and NO failures are socialized).
On a brighter note: I don't discount the future power of Utah et al -- and the fact that we are not an island nation, and the fact that we may be a bunch of equivocating, bleating sheep during the usual booms and busts cycles, but we also have a large contingent of ravenous, unherdable wolves when our survival is threatened. Unlike the Japanese. We are not as "polite" as them. Bernanke's plan CANNOT work if there are competing currencies, because competing sound currencies would drive inflation, not deflation, of the fiat currency, as everyone looked to dump it, opting for currencies that really are a store of value, and the supplies of which cannot be centrally manipulated or controlled. Give us too much Japanese-style deflation austerity, and watch the black market give way to competing currencies anyway, with or without government say-so.
