Are you trolling OP? Unfortunately some have not learned from our past mistakes. The banks have gotten more clever this time around and instead of selling Mortgage Backed Securities to pensions and hedge funds, they're selling it directly to the Federal Reserve. 85 Billion dollars per month, or a little over a trillion a year at 0% interest rates.
When you borrow from the FED for nothing, and charge your cardholder 20%, anyone can make money.
Even if you are only charging 9%, you are stealing them blind with profits relative to cost.
What's a bank with billions of dollars to do? They buy a bunch of useless shit. Drink beer, soda, or energy drinks? JP Morgan and Goldman Sachs have skimmed millions out of the Aluminum market.
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/27/opinion/goldman-sachss-aluminum-pile.html?_r=0If natural laws of economics were in place, banking would be extremely competitive and it would not be very profitable.
But inflation is low, some say. Yes, the official CPI numbers are low, but they are rigged. The price of housing and rent has gone up. The price of petrol, electricity, even the price of printing a dollar is up. Banks can just selectively buy assets and point to the CPI "But look! the CPI is low and inflation isn't hitting it's target"
Ever wonder why rent is sky high while you're unemployed or underemployed and barely able to make payments? Banks are buying up a shitload of houses and rent them out for record profits.
http://business.financialpost.com/2013/04/23/us-rentals/The median asking rent for US vacant housing units just hit an all time high of $735 per month.
There's no way out. Had the US gov't let the banks fail and endured a fast, hard, deep recession starting in 2008, while there's no guarantee because things were already pretty fucked, there was at least a chance to recover. There is no chance now.
So the system will fail, and do so spectacularly, with more and more insane financial inputs until it just suddenly collapses. In the end, banks will try to suck every last dollar out of anything that moves and we're all along for the ride. Short of a global revolution where we go back to sound economic policies such as abolishing central banking, putting a stop to deficit spending with 0% interest rates, and replace the current system with a resource based economy with Bitcoin as a part of it, shit will only get progressively worse. Actually shit will get worse anyway, but thanks to the help of Satoshi, at least we can at least throw off the shackles of .gov and the banksters.
Utter chaos or controlled crash, I keep coming to the same conclusion over and over. The only difference is the timeframe. The more chaotic the events, the faster we reach the inevitable conclusion. Thus, the most chaotic of outcomes might be 2 years or so. The more controlled may be 20. Reality will likely be somewhere in between.
TL;DR I'm not buying OP's perspective on inflation. Shit will only get progressively worse. SOMETHING will happen at some point to trigger a quick escalation of our already collapsing global economy. The question we're all asking is when, and constantly seeking clues... At least I am.