Those whom the gods would destroy they first make mad

http://coveringdelta.wordpress.com/2008/12/06/those-whom-the-gods-destroy-they-first-make-mad/

Excellent discussion, with thoughtful paragraphs like this one:

Today, the US Empire has a monopoly on the production of the only globally accepted, universal medium of exchange – the almighty Dollar. And because this medium is not even paper, but rather represented in the form of bits traveling through cyberspace, the US Republic has the ability to destroy the credibility, and thus the relative value of the currency in proportion to real wealth (wheat, houses, cleaning services, etc.) in the blink of an eye. The question isn’t whether the government can do this but rather if it would be willing to sacrifice the integrity of its currency for the benefit of an industry of institutional debtors (and a handful of super rich private debtors). After listening to Bernanke speak two days ago, and combining this with a pattern of behavior that suggests a complete unwillingness to let any financial institution fail, I am now convinced that the Dollar is on its last breath. In other words, we are dangerously close to the time when the dollar will experience the fastest deterioration of its value in modern history (I say modern only because periods such as the Civil War may have made foreign creditors a bit more nervous about holding dollars, if only for a short while). Historians will study this period with incredible awe. The people most closely involved in the engineering of this unprecedented financial calamity will be hanged in the courts of history, if they are lucky enough to survive the courts of the impoverished mob.