National Public Radio's Democracy Now! posits in an interview with economist Professor Joseph Stiglitz that the US Federal Reserve's latest round of quantitative easing is an act of aggression--though possibly less familiar than more traditional methods of hostility like invasion, religion, piracy, regime-change and building up banana republics, skirmishes surrounding devaluation, igniting currency-wars, have happened before, perhaps most famously after the Great Depression of the 1930s that erupted into World War II. It is rather insidious that loose credit, transnationally at least but banks are no more eager to lend to regular customers, awash in cheap dollars when more hoarding is necessary to retain any semblance of value, can be hewn into weapons, and that the hottest commodity being produced, at least in places where the shell game of government debt is ran by the central banks, is bonds--i.e., debt.
Response will be in kind. The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, always a quirky non sequitur, too, was a complicated if not sometimes opaque allegory, railing against notions of money by government fiat. Maybe when it premiered, audiences who had read the book groaned at a thinly veiled economic policy critique turned into a theatrical production but I am sure such underlying messages were quickly lost in the spectacle of Technicolor. Maybe poverty is meant to be memorialized as a perennial favourite like this, a more welcome survivor and witness than the realities of contraction and hyper-inflation.
