SocGen's Dylan Grice provides a gripping account of Germany's hyperinflationary episode, in which he charts the extended parallels between not just the precursor economy that lead to a 16,579,999% inflation in 1923 Weimar Germany, and modern day developed (and highly leveraged) countries, but between Germany's then central banker Rudolf von Havenstein, and the Greenspan-Bernanke duo. And while we know how "der Geld Marschall's" Weimar experiment ended, the future before the U.S., as a result of the Maestro's (both Senior and Junior) almost identical policy response is still open-ended. As the future of America is now exclusively in the hands of insidious economists, the following insight from Grice into the utility of economic models and decision-making should be sufficient to dash the hopes of any optimist for a favorable outcome.

Quote:

"Is anything more dangerous than a nonsensical idea taken seriously? The esteem of economists has been dented by the financial crisis, though not so severely that the financial community treat economists? views with anything approaching the derision they deserve. The macroeconomic meme is resilient indeed! Sadly, the situation isn?t new. Macroeconomic theory has a long and distinguished history of seducing policymakers into thinking utopia is just around the corner, a trick brought about by untested hypotheses masquerading as empirical knowledge. Believe it or not, a school of economic thought that was prominent in Weimar Germany during the hyperinflation ? and particularly at the Reichsbank as it was aggressively monetising the government deficit ? held that the escalating money supply had nothing to do with the exploding rate of inflation! More on that later. For now, in this new world of policymaking experimentation, it?s worth recalling the British Ambassador to Germany?s observation on the hyperinflation that ?'no one could anticipate such an ingenious revelation of extreme folly to which ignorance and false theory could lead.'"

Hopefully, once the true span of the Great Depression v2 is grasped, once all extend and pretend measures are exhausted, modern society will do away with economists once and for all.