I’ve been trying to search for books lately that will help me learn more about the current economic crisis that all of us are suffering from.

This one’s interesting. :-)

Though, in addition, I’ve been getting a lot of good summaries related to such topic from http://www.bizsum.com

as for hyperinflation vs deflation, the one difference between the current crisis and previous ones is that the dollar is not backed by gold and the Treasury can print as many dollars as they want, and seem intent on doing just that! inflation doesn’t just mean “prices rising” but also increases in the money supply. Helicopter Ben and Hank Bazooka Paulson seem intent on increasing the money supply without any deterrent (in the past this was provided by the limited supply of gold). The Fed’s balance sheet has increased from $900 billion in August to $3 trillion by the end of the year. I’m not sure how we get deflation with an unlimited money supply. I think hyperinflation is more likely.

http://patrick.net/housing/contrib/schiff.html

Trent, you read the Economist and should be familiar with numerous counter-arguments against Schiff’s positions, especially on commodities. which is not to be pollyanna-ish about the current state of the US economy, just to say that you can lose a lot of money in emerging markets & commodities.

it’s almost certainly easier to lose money in those sectors than in blue chips, short of our entire country (and not just it’s economy) going up in flames (er, maybe a slightly insensitive choice of words at the moment). in any case i think we’ll have more to worry about than our retirement accounts at that point…..

he also buys into “de-coupling” of developed economies, which i think the present tumult is ALSO disproving.

Agree that Australia was an interesting choice given that the Aussie dollar imploded back in August from near parity with the US$ to $1.50 per US$ now.

I don’t know the whole story as why so many foreign currencies (foreign to the USA, that is) imploded back in August, but it seems we sold them our crappy debt and kept most of the solid debt. Plus as the US economy went to a definite recession, we quit buying stuff and that hurt the foreign economies more than it has hurt our own.

However, we still have a boatload of debt that, if we don’t raise taxes significantly, we can only inflate our way out of it. So while I don’t necessarily foresee a hyperinflation environment, I can certainly foresee obvious inflation… wonder if the rest of world is tired of our crappy debt and whether they’ll continue to hold our debt instruments?

Unemployment was expected to go up, but at this stage is steady, and interest rates are still on the way down (according to the G20 meeting this weekend).

I guess it would be a more favourable choice, but we seem to follow the US market blindly, although not to the extremes, and on the whole we are a fairly stable economy. That is if China keeps buying our resources.

http://www.crackinsurance.com

Like it or not, we are at the beginning of global recession. Peter’s advice not easy to find in a world of over optimism. America is in a grand dilution to minimize that recession that we face. Many is America are ignoring the level of danger around them or are in mass delusion. Very few economists have a plan for dealing with the coming economic hardship. Peter is not pessimistic, he is realistic and in many ways things could get a lot worse then he predicts.

I recently spent three weeks in Japan, where one of the featured news items were about the numerous Japanese-Brazilians (mostly ethnically Japanese who speak Japanese and Portuguese, but who have lived in Brazil for two generations) have returned to Japan because they can’t find work in the current Brazilian economy.