Am I missing something? In the 80's movie the stars famous quote was "greed is good" today I read articles in the msm glorifying mr Obama as a man of conviction because of his commitment to put the USA further in debt. Meanwhile the Republicans are being portrayed as radical because they speak out about the fact that after 5 years of democratic leadership there's has never been a budget passed. So am I to believe the new montra is "debt is good" and this is how Obama defines a successful recovery?

Obama is printing money to ease the US debt problem. This he can do without much pain to the American economy, as the US Dollar is regarded as a reference to other currencies.

However, as more and more unsupported dollar bills flood the world other currencies are effectively devalued - not against the dollar, maybe, but against the limited resources available in the world. This was the old theory of sticking to the gold standard, or the US issuing 'silver certificate' dollar bills - where an item of paper currency had a fixed value against certain world resources.

This is no longer so. Every time the US Treasury prints another billion dollar's-worth of banknotes, without withdrawing old notes, every currency in the world buys a little less of the finite resources available in the world. Thus the US forces inflation upon all countries, and then gets out of the problem itself by printing yet more bits of near-worthless linen-paper with green ink.

Get back to the gold standard, says I - or at least find some physical item against which one unit of any currency may be valued. Quantitative easing is destroying the very concept of currency, economics and exchange rates.

I agree wholeheartedly, HB.

I've always thought the expression "quantitative easing" was a rather pathetic attempt to hide what they're really doing.... devaluing their own and everybody else's currency.