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Comment by neffy

It won't stop the inflation. When inflation is due to printing money, the only thing that can be done is to sit back and wait for it to work it's way through the system. All raising interest rates would do is trigger a rerun of the Savings and Loan Crisis, as the huge quantity of long term, fixed rate, low interest rate loans, is suddenly devalued by short term, high interest rate loans. (Which is probably going to happen anyway, because Central Bank control over interest rates can be more than slightly illusionary at times like this. (Lenders can work out inflationary devaluation rates just as well as anybody else can.)

2008 was a very different scenario, the money that was printed then was forced into a narrow loop within the financial system and just used to sanitise a lot of bad debt away from the banking system.

In some sense, the eventual logic of the last 20 years of massive increases in the total amount of debt circulating, due to loan securitisation, was that that debt would have to be devalued to make it repayable. And here we are.

parent neffy 4 years ago

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