abstract: daily reckoning Inflation will allow debt to reduce...

abstract: daily reckoning

Inflation will allow debt to reduce day by day. Price rises will make companies going concerns, earning their way back to profit. Pay rises will enable households and consumers to pay down what they owe while saving more and spending some. And inflation allows interest rates to rise but still remain negative in real terms. It is healthier that people receive an annual pay rise than take out an extra annual loan - as they have been doing since 2000. This package will allow markets to breathe again."

Inflation is coming back into style. Count on it.

*** We promised an interview with the master. Forget Keynes. Forget Friedman. The economist that everyone should be paying attention to is Gideon Gono.

Inflation is coming back in style. And Gideon Gono is its star. While other central bankers flounder, he's proven that you can have inflation...and have it more abundantly than you want.

Gono, if you haven't heard of him, is Robert Mugabe's right hand man. And Robert Mugabe is the number one man in Zimbabwe, an African country with a real 'riches to rags' story. It was one of the wealthiest and safest countries in Africa when it was run by Ian Smith in the '70s. But the meddlers and world-improvers couldn't leave well enough alone. They helped put Mugabe in power. Since then, the place has gone to Hell.

Gideon Gono, 47 years old, lives in a 47-bedroom mansion in Harare. He says he doesn't drink, only sleeps 4 hours a night, and runs regularly. He is known as "Mr. Inflation" for his Olympian efforts to increase the country's money supply. He does this the old fashioned way - by printing pieces of paper will lots of zeros on them. Newsweek Magazine seems to have found him in a talkative mood:

Asked what he thought of the worldwide credit crash, he replied:

"I sit back and see the world today crying over the recent credit crunch, becoming hysterical about something which has not even lasted for a year, and I have been living with it for 10 years. My country has had to go for the past decade without credit... Out of the necessity to exist, to ensure my people survive, I had to find myself printing money. I found myself doing extraordinary things that aren't in the textbooks. Then the IMF asked the US to please print money. I began to see the whole world now in a mode of practicing what they have been saying I should not."