[quote=AN]I agree that it could happen. But then again, every country is different and we’ve never experienced a Greece/Spain/Portugal/etc situation before. That doesn’t mean that it can’t happen. It’s just that it hasn’t. We can print more USD while Greece/Spain/Portugal/etc can’t print more Euro to increase inflation.
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Of course we have. It was during the great depression. That was the last time we had a really big debt bubble across all sectors of the economy. Government debt was big during world war II but public debt was next to nothing because everything was being rationed and it was people’s patriot duty to conserve rather than consume.

Certainly congress could cause hyper inflation. They could credit everybody’s bank account with $1 billion dollars but that would detonate ever retirement portfolio in the world in a matter of minutes. One person’s debt is another person’s credit. You can’t get rid of the debt without getting rid of the corresponding credit. Although that’s pretty much the game the economists play in their solutions to the problem. Solve one side of the equation and bury the loss on the other side of the equation with complexity.