re: U.S. Economy Is Better Than People May Feel: Cohn

Yeah, I don't see any reason to suspect an economic crash, and I can't stand when people like Peter Schiff use the term "hyperinflation" to refer to anything less than 1,000%-per-year inflation. I do admit to being one of the people who thought that monetary policy in 2008 would lead to significant inflation by 2010, but it never happened.

It's interesting to think about what will happen with currencies for the remainder of the 21st century. I tend to think that the deflationary malaise of our current period is resulting more in pushes for nationalist currencies, rather than in pushes for globalist currencies. Historically speaking, economic globalization and financial integration seems to occur more during good times than during bad times.

Here's the weird thing about that though--the last time there were movements based on changing monetary policy during deflationary episodes (like the bimetallism movement of the 1840s, the populist "Free Silver" movement of William Jennings Bryan, or the Keynesian movement toward nationalist fiat currencies), these were movements away from currencies that were backed by hard metal. Now we are dealing with the specter of deflation yet again, except this time there is no hard metal baseline to delink the currency from. So whereas previous movements in the past away from hard gold standards were essentially movements away from global currencies and toward nationalist currencies; today we see a situation where currencies are already nationalist, and thus there is no way to push further in that direction.

Monetary theorists in the Cold War era always seemed to assume that consumer price inflation was something that was extremely easy and tempting for governments to do. Now we are seeing that such assumptions were unwarranted. I suspect that in coming decades, many countries will find novel ways to produce consumer price inflation with their national currencies, but so far no major economies have pioneered such a route.