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This post originally appeared in naked capitalism on April 18, 2010. At the time, debate was raging about a “futures market” for films, similar to the futures markets in other commodities. 

This originally appeared in naked capitalism on April 11, 2010—right smack in the middle of the Greek debt crisis. My basic point still stands: The euro is essentially a very complex currency peg among a group of disparate nations that happen to share a continent, but little else.

Update I, below.  There’s a saying in Spanish: Por la boca muere el pez. “The fish dies by the mouth”.   Nobel economics laureate Paul Krugman has a recent op-ed piece in the New York Times which goes an awful long way to showing that he is a complete and utter imbecile—or the worst sort of cheap huckster imaginable. 

Should Alan Greenspan, the former Chairman of the Federal Reserve Board (1987–2006), be tried for Crimes Against the Economy, put up against a concrete wall, handed a cigarette, offered a red blindfold, and then executed by firing squad?  

I usually don’t do follow-up pieces to any of my posts. But my recent longish piece, describing how hyperinflation might happen in the United States, clearly struck a nerve. 

Right now, we are in the middle of deflation. The Global Depression we are experiencing has squeezed both aggregate demand levels and aggregate asset prices as never before. Since the credit crunch of September 2008, the U.S. and world economies have been slowly circling the deflationary drain. 

I’ve been working on a book called The Green of the Republic since late-2006.It’s a panoramic novel set in Dartmouth College, during the academic year 1993-‘94. Each of the half dozen main characters—faculty, administrators and especially students—come to understand the peculiar brand of American conformity and corruption, a rottenness camouflaged by talk of “openness”, “tolerance”, “freedom” and “diversity”.