John Rubino

"We are exporting our inflation to the rest of the world. We are forcing countries like Brazil and China to endure the pain that we should be enduring. Brazil’s interest rates are like 12% right now. China is doing something new every couple of days to scale back bank lending and consumer spending. They are countries where a big part of the population makes just a few dollars a day. Rising food and energy prices are devastating for these guys. They do not really control the global price of energy and food, yet they have to endure the pain of slowing their economies down and throwing people out of work. Have them have to spend more and more of their money on food and energy so we can keep on borrowing and growing.

Clearly that is unsustainable. At some point these countries are going to say “No, we want our currencies to depreciate, too. We want to be able to continue to export to you.” So what we will end up with is sort of like what happened in the Depression. Everybody was trying to cut the value of their currencies at the same time. What that leads to, obviously, is global inflation, instead of just localized inflation where a few countries are debasing their currencies. You have got everybody doing it at once. That is because the US, with the world’s reserve currency, basically controls this process. We have chosen to decrease the value of the dollar dramatically over the next few years. That is going to force the rest of the world to do the same thing or endure an overvalued currency and recession. No elected politician can put up with that.

So what’s out there? Maybe after a mini-recession or some kind of correction in the next year or two is another round — an even bigger round — of global inflation. Basically all the fiat currencies of the world start decreasing in value at an accelerating rate. At some point, the whole concept of fiat currency, of governments in charge of their own monetary printing presses is going to be discredited."