Μαύρα μαντάτα στο απολογητικό βιβλίο του N. Ferguson

«Any highly indebted economy confronts a narrow range of options. There are essentially three:

 * raising the rate of growth above the rate of interest thanks to technological innovation and (perhaps) a judicious use of monetary stimulus;

 * defaulting on a large proportion of the public debt and going into bankruptcy to escape the private debt; and

 * wiping out of debts via currency depreciation and inflation.

But nothing in mainstream economic theory can predict which of these three – or which combination – a particular country will select. Why did post-1918 Germany go down the road of hyperinflation? Why did post-1929 America go down the road of private default and bankruptcy? Why not the other way round? At the time of writing, it seems less and less likely that any major developed economy will be able to inflate away its liabilities as happened in many cases in the 1920s and 1950s.9 But why not? Milton Friedman’s famous dictum that inflation is ‘always and everywhere a monetary phenomenon’ leaves unanswered the questions of who creates the excess money and why they do it. In practice, inflation is primarily a political phenomenon. Its likelihood is a function of factors like the content of elite education; competition (or the lack of it) in an economy; the character of the legal system; levels of violence; and the political decision-making process itself. Only by historical methods can we explain why, over the past thirty years, so many countries created forms of debt that, by design, cannot be inflated away; and why, as a result, the next generation will be saddled for life with liabilities incurred by their parents and grandparents».

N. Ferguson: «The Great Degeneration»