Current economic "thinking" stretches all the way from the gold standard to cryptocurrency. From currency warfare to trade isolationism. From fractional reserve banking to microbarter. It is truly a practice involving impossible things and breakfast.

The basic issue is that governments can print money. This gives them more money. Each unit of money is worth less. Suddenly people are burning million Deutschmark notes for fuel. That's the downside. The upside is if you have sovereign debt accounted in your currency, you print all the currency you need and poof you're out of debt. Obviously this tends to piss off your creditors but it's not like it isn't done.

So. We can point at Germany, Mexico, Zimbabwe, Argentina, all sorts of places with runaway inflation and say ZOMG SUPERBAD!!!one but then some wiseass starts pointing out that the United States in 2016 isn't exactly Argentina in 2000 or Germany in 1922.

But how different is it?

And that's where the debate starts getting really arcane and people throw around terms like Bretton Woods and shit but at the end of the day, nobody really knows.

There were a couple hot-shit economists who thought they did. Turns out they didn't know how to run Excel.