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Pretty much. You get into such insane levels of debt by borrowing more and more every year, by leading a lifestyle that you can't afford. "Lifestyle" in case o

Pretty much. You get into such insane levels of debt by borrowing more and more every year, by leading a lifestyle that you can't afford. "Lifestyle" in case of government spending being the levels of healthcare, education, social services, war, tax & tariff rates, capital controls, etc. If you don't want to be crushed by interest payments, eventually you'll need to pay up, and that means inflation, possibly hyperinflation, and a crash of a lot of systems that we take for granted.

orwin 6y ago
I think i will repeat myself in this thread: printing money ALONE does not create hyperinflation. I don't understand where this belief came from. Even standards/orthodox/right-leaning economists agree. Unless the US is suddenly also incapable of producing (and this is impossible), you won't ever have hyperinflation even if the fed did twice the QE they are already doing only to reimburse US gov debt.
- nikitaga 6y ago
  > printing money ALONE does not create hyperinflation Printing ever-increasing amounts of money to finance expenditures that you can't afford will definitely result in correspondingly huge inflation. I don't know if it will qualify as hyper, but you are very much not going to like it. We could be printing 10x money that we are printing now. We aren't, and we're not short of paper. There's a very real cost to increasing money supply – by printing, QE, or whatever fancy names you call it – even if many people don't realize it yet. As long as asset inflation is seen by the general population as "stocks / housing are going up, therefore the economy is booming" we have a chance to maintain the illusion of normalcy, but eventually enough people will catch on where the real inflation numbers are hidden, and it's not gonna be pretty. Inflation is not driven just by economic fundamentals, it is just as much driven by people's expectations, and trust in the system. Economic models assume rationality, which, along with trust in government, is increasingly in short supply, and that is an economic problem as much as it is a social one.

orwin 6y ago

I think i will repeat myself in this thread: printing money ALONE does not create hyperinflation. I don't understand where this belief came from. Even standards/orthodox/right-leaning economists agree. Unless the US is suddenly also incapable of producing (and this is impossible), you won't ever have hyperinflation even if the fed did twice the QE they are already doing only to reimburse US gov debt.

nikitaga 6y ago
> printing money ALONE does not create hyperinflation Printing ever-increasing amounts of money to finance expenditures that you can't afford will definitely result in correspondingly huge inflation. I don't know if it will qualify as hyper, but you are very much not going to like it. We could be printing 10x money that we are printing now. We aren't, and we're not short of paper. There's a very real cost to increasing money supply – by printing, QE, or whatever fancy names you call it – even if many people don't realize it yet. As long as asset inflation is seen by the general population as "stocks / housing are going up, therefore the economy is booming" we have a chance to maintain the illusion of normalcy, but eventually enough people will catch on where the real inflation numbers are hidden, and it's not gonna be pretty. Inflation is not driven just by economic fundamentals, it is just as much driven by people's expectations, and trust in the system. Economic models assume rationality, which, along with trust in government, is increasingly in short supply, and that is an economic problem as much as it is a social one.