Examiner Editorial: Get ready for Obama’s coming hyperinflation
April 30, 2009
Santayana’s maxim — those who refuse to learn from history are doomed to repeat it — has grown threadbare from heavy use. But it unavoidably comes to mind this week, as President Barack Obama and his fellow Democrats on Capitol Hill blithely put the final touches on the chief executive’s proposed 2010 federal budget.
With an unprecedented deficit that’s approaching $2 trillion, this budget proposal is a surefire prescription for hyperinflation. So every senator and representative who votes for this monster $3.6 trillion budget will be endorsing a spending spree that could very well turn America into the next Weimar Republic. For those too young to remember, that was the period in Germany in the years between the two world wars when people needed wheelbarrows full of money to buy a loaf of bread.
In a 1993 interview, Harvard University law professor Friedrich Kessler offered a chilling portrait of the Weimar Republic: “It was horrible. Horrible! Like lightning it struck. No one was prepared. The shelves in the grocery store were empty. You could buy nothing with your paper money.”
Thanks to the expanding profligacy on Capitol Hill, a version of such economic hell will likely happen here, according to two prominent economists. Johns Hopkins University professor Steve Hanke notes that the Federal Reserve’s balance sheet “has more than doubled in size since August. Unless the Fed shrinks its balance sheet,” he warns, “... inflation will roar back with a vengeance.”
The printing presses have been running nonstop since Congress approved the Troubled Asset Relief Program and the $787 billion bailout of insolvent firms that went wobbly after abusing “easy credit.” Yet with interest rates now close to zero, Hanke points out that the Fed is merely “prescribing more of the same.”
In their groundbreaking Monetary History of the United States, Anna Schwartz and the late Nobel Prize winner Milton Friedman found that then (as now) a huge influx of foreign capital accompanied the early stages of Weimar hyperinflation. Schwartz, who today believes the “systemic risk” cited as justification to recapitalize failed financial institutions was just an excuse to save bankers’ hides, agrees that massive inflation is “unavoidable.”
There have been other, more recent, bouts of hyperinflation. After years of deficits, the former Yugoslavia tried to print its way out of a similar predicament, then imposed price controls to counter the inevitable 15 to 25 percent annual inflation rate. Economic collapse quickly followed the worst hyperinflation in history. On Nov. 12, 1993, 1 million dinars could be traded for one German deutsche mark; by Jan. 4, 1994, the exchange rate was 6 trillion to one.
With Obama’s reckless 2010 budget — which was passed without a single Republican vote — Democrats are playing with inflationary fire.
