Quote from: exstasie on Today at 11:58:25 AM

Quote from: Keiser Soze on Today at 05:14:18 AM

Do we really believe that the Americans people and politicians are willing to sacrifice and face hardships for a decade?

I strongly feel they will continue to print money to prop up this house of cards, and by the time it really starts to fall, the big guns will come out.

Look at Japan. Worst debt to GDP ratio in the world. Their endless public spending and bailouts caused two decades of stagnation, contraction, and wage losses.

Lots of US businesses, no longer sustainable in a deflating economy, are being pumped full of debt through a combination of bailout loans and Fed junk bond buying. If this band-aid solution doesn't work and bad debt spills into a banking crisis, the situation begins to look a lot like Japan in the early 1990s:

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The financial institutions were bailed out through capital infusions from the government, loans and cheap credit from the central bank, and the ability to postpone the recognition of losses, ultimately turning them into zombie banks. Yalman Onaran of Bloomberg News writing in Salon stated that the zombie banks were one of the reasons for the following long stagnation. Additionally Michael Schuman of Time magazine wrote that these banks kept injecting new funds into unprofitable "zombie firms" to keep them afloat, arguing that they were too big to fail. However, most of these companies were too debt-ridden to do much more than survive on bail-out funds.

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In response to chronic deflation and low growth, Japan has attempted economic stimulus and thereby run a fiscal deficit since 1991. These economic stimuli have had at best nebulous effects on the Japanese economy and have contributed to the huge debt burden on the Japanese government. Expressed as a percentage of GDP, at ~240% Japan had the highest level of debt of any nation on earth as of 2013. While Japan's is a special case where the majority of public debt is held in the domestic market and by the Bank of Japan, the sheer size of the debt demands large service payments and is a worrying sign of the country's financial health.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lost_Decade_(Japan)

What I'm saying is, maybe the house of cards won't fall. Maybe we'll just have a brutal decade of deflation, a shrinking economy, falling wages, tight credit, etc. and a ballooning public debt....... and life will go on. That's what happened in Japan anyway.

And what I'm saying is that, the US government will never allow massive deflation such as Japan to occur. They don't need to, since they have the biggest gun in this movie. Who's gonna go and collect debt from an armed thug? Imagine 1 Euro = 50$ US, or 100 YEN = 100$ US - can you? I surely can't. I'm quite sure they will try and invade a few more countries, try and siphon off Venezuela's oil, and keep trying to live on the same pattern of unsustainable consumption at other's expense that they have been used to for decades.

The rest of us are in for a decade of war rather than deflation. Just my 2 cents.