Geezer, you repeat a couple of times that sovereign nations or governments can print their own money. That is not accurate, for what is now a common knowledge. Governments do not print, and Central Banks are not actually government institutions. The best a government can do is to borrow money from "its" Central Bank - and that would be indeed like printing money, except with the interest rate attached. And paying back that money with all interest requires more money to be "printed" through debt issue.

This is indeed a serious game, even more dramatic than privileged hunting. Money creation has stopped, as there is no bubble to justify a massive credit issue. Common folks are desperate for fishing out the money that is left in their circulation. The haves won't be making double digit profits, but they are going to live even better (if they can ignore gloomy surroundings). Real sharks will continue receiving interest payments (almost in full) while doing nothing - that is the best way of living in the new neo-feodalism. And that will continue for a long time. The real face of money now is that of privilege - think of accumulated credit in the other sense of the word. What the TARP really did is that it excused the big banks from their insane financial obligations while keeping their credit claims intact. That is quite a huge item of favoritism, when you think about it.

This is not quite a time to be philosophical about utopias. This is a singular development, that fixed financial game approaching its Endspiel. It won't be pretty, regardless of whether it will go according to the fixed plans. At best, the world is hijacked by a group of top bankers. Slightly worse, the big governments have no good clue what they are doing or what is actually happening.