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The United States Money Supply


The painting is by William Robertson Leigh, and is entitled The Gambler. You can find it and other American art on this site.

I found the following graph on a somewhat conservative American site. It purports to come from the Federal reserve in St Louis. It shows American money supply. If the US economy is deflating, given this vast monetary stimulus, then a fiscal stimulus will do very little except encourage a short-term euphoria at the expense of a very great inflation in the future. I write that knowing what unemployment and redundancy mean.

President Obama could very easily, and horribly, fail. The British government, of course, is now routinely covering up the extent of its money-printing. The western world is preparing to overborrow on the back of dubious flows of global finance, then inflate away its debt. As in Weimar, this will fail.



I love the American republic. I know its faults, you might say intimately, and its badnesses. Since we will all suffer from an American collapse, and since global deflation may well be followed by a money-and-oil-driven inflation, I just want to note some lines of President Kennedy's that the graph brings to mind;

let us not be blind to our differences, but let us also direct attention to our common interests and the means by which those differences can be resolved. And if we cannot end now our differences, at least we can help make the world safe for diversity. For in the final analysis, our most basic common link is that we all inhabit this small planet. We all breathe the same air. We all cherish our children's futures. And we are all mortal.

Even republics. I hope this gamble works ; I cannot afford gold.

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