Originally Posted by gloopy

Agreed. In the end they will have no choice but to sumbit to either massive, immediate austerity measures to the welfare/warfare machines that the left and the right will never do, or to simply print the money. They are printing it now anyway, but they are finding buyers for it. When that ends we will all eat a huge load of stagflation lasting years. Before they wise up, they will print more money trying to "stimulate" their way out of it, making things worse in the process, making the already bad even worse before it finally gets better.

The talking heads will pimp their "market cycle" theory and keynsean fraudnomics 24/7 for years without challenge from the elites in the media and academia, and the pension mongers in congress will rubber stamp whatever comes their way.

The American people have already been directly threatened with martial law (despite the fact that it does not legally exist) by Berkane and Geithner if we don't automatically pass whatever 5000 page bill du jour nobody's read that suddenly appeared on everyone's desk for a morning vote the next day, and we've fallen for it every time.

We've seen the biggest poitical shift in congress in 70 years last year over the out of control spending, yet nothing has changed. Both sides squabble over a fraction of one percent, then settle on even less.

So yes, we are going to absolutely feast on inflation. The definiton of inflation has been modified over the years to hide the true cost to the people and its about to be modified again to further hide its effects.

I was just being sarcastic with the "raise over the life of" nonsense that ALPA and the company constantly try to sell us on. Double digit inflation for a few years could mean we get 50% raises over the life of a typical 4 or 5 year contract and still lose buying power. No one knows this better than RA with his work on the ATL fed board of governors. He even specifically mentioned stagflation as both a general economic threat as well as a specific industry issue in a very recent letter to the employees.

Whatever happens with C2012, I will not sit idly by and let a malevolent management and/or an incompetent union leadership sell their "raise over the life of" snake oil propaganda without making sure at least reasonable, average to expected inflation, compounded yearly, is 100% backed out of any and all claims of "raise over the life of". Its time we own how this debate is framed.

If we as a group settle for less, then we settle for less. Shame on us to be sure, but there is no way we are going to allow us to settle for anything while calling it more than it is.

In any case, getting back to the timeline, I'm not sure when its really going to start picking up, as it depends on many factors that haven't fully played out yet. The core causes of inflation are happening right now, so its acceleration is a certainty. The only question is when. Our dollar bubble and debt bubbles will really start popping when we are no longer able to monetize the debt to foreign creditors and they stop buying it. By then we will be in the 15-20 trillion range (not even including long term unfunded obligations) and the interest alone to service what we have, even assuming a permantly balanced budget at that point [yeah right, as if!] will exceed the Reagan defense budgets on a yearly basis. We are seeing inflation now, but the talking heads are denying it because they are hiding behind revamped economic sophistry imbibed definitions, but we will really be dealing with it in the near future. That's why I said in a couple years, but I agree we're not doing ourselves any favors right now either.