printGermany’s Chancellor Angela Merkel (a former East German physicist) has refused to heed the hedonist B. Hussein Obama (an agitator from Chicago) who is urging her to print and inflate her country’s currency to Weimar-Republic levels.
“Financier- philanthropist” George Soros—also an all-round radical and BHO surrogate—has stepped in to muscle Merkel implying, writes Amity Shlaes, that,
“Germany should look to the U.S., where President Barack Obama has spent vigorously and Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke has created money for the greater good. Soros, the tutor again, underscored that Germany clearly “does not know what it is doing.”
There are reasons for the meddling:
Beyond Merkel’s personal memory there is the German national memory of the 1920s hyperinflation. That resulted from the decision of a desperate Weimar Republic to inflate its way out of war debts. That hyperinflation so punished middle-class savings and so weakened the 1920s economy that the average German became more susceptible to maniacs like Adolf Hitler and the communists.
Pressure on Germany from Soros, and for that matter, from the Obama administration, makes it harder for Merkel or other European leaders to heed their own sound instincts. Soros’s pressure also obscures a desirable policy path for Germany, one in which it practices fiscal discipline and growth creation so well that other euro nations emulate it.
Read Shlaes’ analysis.
Interesting post. Soros is a piece of human garbage. One difference is that the USA didn’t need hyperinflation to fall for a Marxist leader. The loonies and the leeches voted him in anyway. I just hope that Merkel stands her ground.
Germany is going to become the financial powerhouse of the world in the next decade or so. How could it not when almost the entire population is made up of, well, germans.
It seems that the Europeans are seeing the light that tax and spend socialism is not the way to go. So what do the Americans do? Embrace this school of economic and political thought even though it has never worked any where or at any time. As Bugs Bunny would say; “What a bunch of maroons.”
I note Greg, in the comments, has already made the point of George Soros being ‘human garbage’ but some points cannot be made often or strong enough.
Soros is resident evil salting the earth wherever he treads and leaving behind diabolically malevolent NGOs with the signal purpose of destroying every civilizing impulse humans have been able to muster. And hyperbole be damned – by evil I mean EVIL.
Wait, Soros is being rebuked (however subtly) by someone at the CFR? That, by itself, is interesting and worthy of notice.
I have no brilliant things to say about Soros and currency debauchery but it is nice that there are some intellectual hotties like you, Amity, Diana West, Ayn Rand (deceased) and even a few good politicians like chemists Margaret and Angela. Let us hope that Angela is an Iron Lady and does not go wobbly on currency.
By the way, I don’t put Sistah Sarah in the intellectual hottie department – she is more a narcissistic airhead with some decent (libertarian) instincts. I will say that Anorexic Ann (Coulter) had an excellent column today distinguishing “judicial activism” as in discovering new meanings of the “living constitution” from overturning unconstitutional statutes.
On the other hand, with Georges Soros and Bush and Barack Obama, there may not be much hope for the male of the species.