
Is there a secret plan relating to inflation? Could it be this was the plan all along, that is inflation? Is your savings safe from inflation? Interest rates have been low for a long time. Don't be fooled, rates are headed up! Do you know what to do? 
But even if the stimulus is a magnificent success, the money still has to be paid back. The plan of record apparently is that we keep borrowing, spending and stimulating, faster and faster, until suddenly, on some signal from heaven or Timothy Geithner, we all stop spending and start saving in recordbreaking amounts. Oh sure, that will work. There is another way. If it’s not the actual, secret plan, it will be an overwhelming temptation: Don’t pay the money back. So far, even as one piggy bank after another astounds us with its emptiness, there have been only the faintest whispers about the possibility of an actual default by the U.S. government. Somewhat louder whispers can be heard, though, about the gradual default known as inflation. Just three or four years of currency erosion at, say, 10 percent a year would slice the real value of our debt — public and private, U.S. bonds and jumbo mortgages — in half. 
Anyone who regards the prospect of double-digit inflation with insouciance is either too young to have lived through it the last time (the late 1970s) or too old to remember. Among other problems, inflation works only as a surprise or betrayal. It can never be part of any public, official plan. Plan for 10 percent inflation, and you’ll get 20. Plan for 20 and you’ll need a wheelbarrow to pay for your morning Starbucks. But if that’s not the plan, what is?
I don’t know whether this is a plan, secret or otherwise, but it’s a strong possibility. We’re basically printing money at an extraordinary rate and spending it out of any relation to income. Inflation is a natural consequence. 

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