And on the related subjects of trade deficits and their relationship to the soundness or unsoundness of money, Robert Murphy explains some facts about trade deficits that tend to get ignored.

And if I have somehow managed to point you toward Mises posts and you want to read them in the español, it turns out the Mises blog gets translated into Spanish here.

A bipartisan committee in Congress has released projections for the next ten years.  They estimate that over the upcoming decade, there will be a total of 9.8 trillion in deficits, bringing our debt up to 20.28 trillion.  For those who, like me, simply feel numbness at that figure, that’s almost 1 1/2 times the 14.2 trillion our country produces each year, and over 9 1/2 times the amount of taxes we take in per year.  That would be rather like a broke family making 40,000 a year owing 380,000–a family with rapidly rising costs and retiring grandparents who will soon have to be supported.

Now, unless there is a radical change in that family’s finances, the family will, one way or another, have to find a way to default on its debts.  In the U.S. government’s case, there are a number of ways that could be done.  We could just default, but that would be politically ugly.  But I rather suspect that we’ll try to shrink the real size of the debt by means of inflation–using the government’s ability to produce dollars to increase the dollar supply and decrease the value of the dollar.  And it’ll take a big decrease in the value of the dollar.  And this will result either in the financial pain that always accompanies hyperinflation, including severe pain for all lenders and money-holders of all sorts along with disruption of trade, or else it will lead to the logical end of every fiat currency:  the crack-up boom.