What Happens When All The Money Vanishes Into Thin Air?

Issuing debt and printing money do not create wealth. All they can create is a temporary illusion of wealth.

I could have written "if all the money vanishes," but that would be misleading, for all unbacked money will most certainly vanish into thin air. The only question is when, not if. Frequent contributor Harun I. explains why:

Those who fail to understand that the Status Quo is impossible to maintain will be shocked when the disintegration is undeniable. But the whole thing was perverse to begin with. Words like capitalism and meritocracy are thrown around to make people feel good when, in reality, we have never owned anything, not even ourselves.

How can we own ourselves when the very thing we use for subsistence can be cheapened or reduced to nearly nothing, not by market forces, but by central banks acting at the behest of governments? When a person does not control his labor, what is he?

I have been studying the monetary history of the world for the past few weeks. I can tell you that the second oldest profession is currency debasement. Nothing is new.

Of course, this should be no surprise, everything is cyclical. Humankind is like the trader looking for the Holy Grail. There is no perfect monetary system, there is only better and worse. And this one ranks among the worst.

I wait patiently for people to come to the understanding that the only way for everyone to get their money would be to destroy its value completely, meaning that a loaf of bread would be a million dollars. If a small fraction of what has to be printed to keep the system afloat has caused the price spikes in energy and everything else, imagine what happens as the disintegration picks up speed.

As the exponential debt curve moves closer to the pure vertical, the rate at which debts come due will approach infinity. Of course, while this is the ultimate mathematical outcome, the reality is that the system will collapse before this point is reached. But don't think governments will throw in the towel. If history holds true the rise of a totalitarian government is just over the horizon.

Then there are those who get it right and wrong in the same breath. John Mauldin, in a KWN interview, thanked Europe for keeping the heat off the US. Mr. Mauldin apparently does not understand that our monetary policies are transferring what we do not want to the rest of the world, at least for a time, but not much more.

How many more food items be made smaller and sold at the same price? In effect this is a slow starvation of those at the margin. The 46 million American souls on food stamps will soon find their food stamps to be worthless.

Those who assert that a credit system cannot go hyper-inflationary may not have thought through the exponential effects on the relationship of the debt and productivity curves within the context of all money is debt and the only way to create money is for debt to be created. Eventually the debt curve accelerates away from the productivity curve, then the productivity curve collapses all together. Sovereign debt crises caused by governments stepping in to keep the debt system going is the last stage. Then comes the debt/currency collapse.

Even if the Fed stopped printing money, I fail to see the difference between too much money that is worth nothing, and no money at all. It's not going to matter to a starving man that a loaf of bread is $1 million and he is a dollar short, or if it's $1 and he is a dollar short.

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