Yes.  Here's the link.

Conservatives want live babies so they can raise them to be dead soldiers. - George Carlin

...to recover the riches we paid for, hey...

Patrice Ayme Patriceayme.com Patriceayme.wordpress.com http://tyranosopher.blogspot.com/

But, like I mentioned above, it's not really $13 trillion.  Of the $13 trillion committed by political authorities in the US, only $4.1 trillion has actually been spent.  Looking at the Bloomberg article you linked to above, it looks unlikely that much more of that committed amount ever will be spent. Only $1.7 trillion of the $7.6 trillion committed by the Fed has been spent so far, and when you look at the line items with committments outstanding, I just don't see where they are likely to be used. The FDIC commitments will also largely go unused as there are few remaining opportunities for major bankruptcies in American banks to use up that $2 trillion dollar commitment.  Only the fiscal part of this -- the US treasury -- is likely to be used and also increased in subsequent years.  That's the tax and borrow part, not the inflationary monetary expansion part.

So monetary expansion has been, and I think will continue to be, quite modest and still probably results in a net decrease in total public and private credit and purchasing power available to capitalists -- still a deflationary situation regarding asset prices.  

I think you have your banker hat on here when you should be using your economist hat.  Balance sheet entries do not say much about true levels of real goods and services, counterparty confidence, and purchasing power in an economy.  That requires economic intuition, not accounting intuition which you appear to be relying on too closely with this diary.  It's the same mistake conservatives like Merkel are making.  

That said, I think you're alluding to valid criticism of overspending in general and that is that it probably does matter what public funds are spent on, something that most Keynesian liberals don't accept.  Spending on investments that will save energy costs and increase human and social capital through education and institutional/infrastructure development and maintenance are likely to reduce future inflation rather than add to it.  There is some truth to the conservative point that the American economy recovered without inflation after WWII largely because its risky investment in destroying the rest of planet's capital paid off in a big way -- it was a major investment with quantifiable returns, not just digging holes as Keynes suggested was sufficient.

It would seem prudent to be concerned about both inflation and deflation, but is important to keep in mind what is the most pressing current problem without forgetting and leaving ourselves helpless in the face of the following problem.  I would be much happier were the USA spending $Trillions more on alternative energy investments and several times that investment less on guarantees to the banking sector.

What is needed is concerted effort to sever the hands of dying financial institutions that are currently around the neck of the entire US society before that sector drags us all into an early grave.  It is NOT a question of spending or guarantees per se, but rather a question of the long term effectiveness of that spending and those guarantees and the constraints they place on future policy.  See the second link in my comment down thread.  It is to a paper by Simon Johnson showing the consequences of such decisions.  See also the post based on Edward Harrison below.  We can say "Fuck inflation", but we had better be prepared to be well and truly fucked by inflation if we are unprepared when recovery is underway.

As the Dutch said while fighting the Spanish: "It is not necessary to have hope in order to persevere."

The rating for Jerome's "traditional conservatives" comment was intended to be a 4.  Grrr, why can't those who make a rating edit that rating?  At least then we could clean up after ourselves.

As the Dutch said while fighting the Spanish: "It is not necessary to have hope in order to persevere."

There's always been an interesting fight in the oped pages of the WSJ between the neolibs and the traditional conservatives.

Here's a traditional conservative's reaction:

Merkel for the Fed
The German leader's welcome rebuke to central bankers.

To the Red Sox winning the World Series, we can now add another miracle for the ages: A politician demanding tighter money. We refer to German Chancellor Angela Merkel, who in a Berlin speech Tuesday rebuked the world's central bankers, notably including the U.S. Federal Reserve, for being too politically accommodating. Hallelujah, sister.

(...)

Notwithstanding Mr. Bernanke's "comfort" with his actions so far, the world is wondering when the Fed will start to remove the flood of money it has injected into the economy during the crisis. Mr. Bernanke says not to worry, as his mentor Alan Greenspan also did yesterday. But this is cold comfort given their earlier track record. The Fed's habit is to look at backward indicators, such as the cost-of-living index and the jobless rate, rather than at currency and commodity prices that can warn of asset bubbles and inflation ahead. This is precisely the mistake both men made in 2003, as the recently released Fed transcripts from that year illustrate. The warning that Mrs. Merkel -- and China and the financial markets -- is sounding is whether the Fed will have the political courage to start removing that liquidity even if the unemployment rate is high, and before it creates another mess.

In the long run, we're all dead. John Maynard Keynes

Traditional conservatives like the WSJ, the Mises Institute, Peter Schiff, et al?

Neolibs like Krugman, Stiglitz, Roubini, et al?

Yeah....

Conservatives want live babies so they can raise them to be dead soldiers. - George Carlin