On Apr 18, 4:41*pm, "Mr. Jaggers" lugburzman[at]yahoo[dot]com wrote:
oly wrote:
On Apr 18, 4:32 pm, "mazorj" wrote:
"oly" wrote in message

....

...
The greatest currency debasements in history arose from the needs
to finance World War I, World War II and Vietnam.

True, but I wouldn't stop there. At this point, you can't ignore the
cumulative effects of our adventurism in Iraq and Afghanistan on the
soundness of the dollar.

On another level, Soviet expenditures in the Cold War and Afghanistan
probably sapped the ruble more than enough to qualify as a
contributing factor in the fall of the USSR.

The cost of war in blood, treasure, and the pursuit of happiness is
orders of magnitude beyond the ken of most people. Even when we do
learn it as a hard-knocks lesson in hindsight, every nation in the
"civilized" world seems to forget it every generation or two.

To tie this back to coin relevance: Devaluation of any currency
makes the lowest denominations more and more superfluous. The mill
is long gone, as are the half-cent, 2- and 3-cent pieces. These used
to have useful places in monetary transactions. Now, people are
asking "Of what use, sir, is the penny?" Furthermore, the recent
slide in demand for new higher-denomination coinage has forced the
Mint to reduce its output of what used to be their core business in
business strikes.

Needless to say, all of this does not bode well for, and is
detrimental to the interests of collectors. IMO we are best served
under the conditions of a sound economy and a stable dollar.

I tend to agree that it is almost incomprehensible why there has not
been more inflation in the U.S.A. as of early 2010. *But perhaps the
vast military spending and financial industry bailouts have been more
than offset by the collapse in house and commercial real estate prices
and the unwillingness of lenders to advance new monies to borrowers at
a sufficient pace to spur prices.

I seem to remember a discussion of this on a talking heads show. *The
consensus was that the inflation of 1979-80 was the delayed result of
accumulated, unbudgeted Vietnam War expenditures. *I certainly hope that
your assessment above is accurate.

By the way, I'm not going to try to find it, but you made a prediction early
in 2009 about how many banks would fail by the end of the year. *How did
that all shake out, high, low, or fairly accurate?

James the Moneychanger- Hide quoted text -

- Show quoted text -

The inflation that you recall as condensed into the Carter years was
really a steady, mounting phenomena from 1966 to 1984 or so. For
instance, Nixon instituted "price controls" in 1971.

I don't recall and can't find my bank failure prediction easily
either. Actually, there were 140 bank failures in 2009. Asset-wise,
total assets in failed banks in 2009 was totally off-the-charts
because of the failure of giant-sized Washington Mutual.

If anyone can find what I posted, I would be interested.

Professionally, I was told an official prediction of 250 bank failures
in 2010, and I thought that sounded plausible. However, as of
4/19/2010, we are maybe 50 banks or so behind that pace.

There remains a shortage of trained bank examiners and qualified bank
liquidation personnel. The makes it impossible to go as fast as
desirable in evaluating and closing problem shops.

oly