In an earlier post, Marc Lee mentioned in passing the German hyperinflation episode of the 1920s. It's remarkable that this event still holds such sway over the popular imagination despite other more recent instances of hyperinflation. Certainly, the imagery is powerful: German citizens pushing wheelbarrows full of worthless paper money around for everyday purchases, banknotes used as wallpaper, or dramatic charts showing a hyperbolic spike in the price of gold measured in German marks.

Richard Gilbert's article "Why not print money?" in the Globe's Economy Lab toys with more radical monetary intervention as a response to the crisis. Desperate times, they say, call for desperate measures. The title (which was perhaps not Gilbert's at all) is more provocative than the article itself, which is mostly about tolerating higher inflation that could have beneficial impacts for easing our way through the current crisis.

President Obama made an energy speech this week that had little new to offer, while on Capitol Hill, Republicans were pushing to relieve the government of its last options to limit carbon emissions. In the House, Republicans have passed a bill that would keep the EPA from regulating carbon, and in the Senate, Majority Leader Harry Reid repeatedly pushed back a vote on the same issue.

German Chancellor, Angela Merkel, claimed recently in a bizarre twist of logic that "multiculturalism" did not work in Germany. Really? When exactly did Germany have a commitment to "multiculturalism"? Does she really believe that their labour market strategy of getting cheap labour from Turkey without offering those workers a status, let alone equality, in Germany is multiculturalism?

Der Spiegel Online has a very interesting piece on the German army's new found enthusiasm for air strikes and armed drones:

It was a summer's day in June 2009 when the German army in Afghanistan first used U.S. Army drones in combat. With hindsight, some observers say that was the day the German military lost its innocence in Afghanistan. The firing of deadly rockets from drones on the orders of a German commander was part of the new reality of war in northern Afghanistan.