Day: January 31, 2011

Hyperinflation is now here

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Monty Pelerin makes some interesting observations about Gary Shilling’s investment advice, saying that it works when things are normal, but the global financial situation is anything but normal today.  Indeed, I believe that the signs of hyperinflation are now here, and I’m not the only one.  Even some of the mainstream papers are starting to see it (e.g., the Globe & Mail).  Indeed, I have virtually no fear now that my portfolio is going to plunge like it did in 2008–I have the Bernanke put to count on.  If asset prices go down, he’ll just monetize more debt and it’s back to races.

So I made this comment on Monty Pelerin’s article:

I follow a blog whose author likes Gary Shilling. His portfolio was static in 2009 and he didn’t bother telling us his returns in 2010. By contrast, our own portfolio is up high double digits (See DIY 2010 summary). Whose advice am I following? Jim Rogers, Marc Faber and Peter Schiff–long commodities, esp. gold and oil. This is an anti-inflationary portfolio and it is already up handsomely. I don’t think we have to wait for high inflation or even hyperinflation. I believe that hyperinflation is already here.

Look at the international situation. (BTW, I loved the video of Jim Grant that you recommended.) The Chinese and others who hold US treasuries are scared to death of the devaluation of the dollar, but they can’t dump them all at once or their hyperinflationary fears become instantly realized. So they are buying up assets, diversifying their holdings. Billions of Asia dollars have been sunk into the Canadian resource sector, while the Chinese have essentially ended their net purchases of US treasuries. So how does the Fed react to this? Buy, buying the debt, and monetizing (pun intended).

When the bubble finally hits the commodities market–and I don’t think there is a bubble yet by any stretch of the imagination since Americans can still afford gasoline and food–I think I will dump the commodities and purchase a farm. But until them, I’m still very long on Canadian resource companies, especially junior oils. The Chinese want what Canada’s got, and they are the most liquid players in town.

See also http://www.beatingtheindex.com/weekend-edition-expect-more-energy-deals-in-2011/

Who owns Dietrich Bonhoeffer? Liberals or evangelicals?

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My wife and some other friends have enjoyed reading Bonhoeffer: Pastor, Martyr, Prophet, Spy. There have been some negative reviews of Metaxas (see this post), and it seems it can be boiled down to one thing:  certain Liberal critics believe that Bonhoeffer belongs to them, that he is part of their heritage: he is a liberal like them, so evangelicals find inspiration in Bonhoeffer only illegitimately because he believed, among other things, in biblical criticism.  Therefore, Metaxas portrayal of Bonhoeffer is wishful thinking, a reading into the history of Germany his own sentiments.

Why are they saying this?  And why are liberals, who don’t hardly even believe in Jesus, claiming the author of The Cost of Discipleship as one of their own, when they hardly even desire to be disciples of Christ and mock those who do?  My hunch at this point is that liberals are running from their terrible legacy in Nazi Germany and they want to hold up Bonhoeffer as their own because he is the most famous theologian that opposed Hitler.

Liberal theologians are largely distinguished from orthodox Christians by their questioning of tradition:  this includes both scriptural (the Bible) and ecclesial traditions (the creeds).  They also have a tendency to insist upon evolution as the only means to explain the origin of the species, and they also tend to believe in human progress and the ability of government to provide solutions to social problems (statism, socialism, etc.).  Well it doesn’t take much research to see which side the liberals were on in Nazi Germany.  They were often anti-semitic–since they themselves belonged to the more evolved Arian nation race–and generally supporters of the Third Reich.

Against them, the more conservative Christians with whom today’s evangelicals can mostly identify–affirmed the reliability and authority of Church tradition, including both the Bible and the historic creeds.  Bonhoeffer signed the Barmen Declaration which claimed the exclusivity of Christ and opposed both the liberal church and the Nazi state; he belonged to the Confessing Church which remained faithful to the authority of the Scriptures, both Old and New Testament, against the liberal German Christian Movement which denied it.  Then, Bonhoeffer went further and was involved in a plot against Hitler.  If Bonhoeffer wasn’t an American evangelical, he wasn’t an 21st century liberal either.  But the liberals of today, who constantly question the reliability and authority of the Scriptures stand closest not to Bonhoeffer, who affirmed these basic truths, but to the Harnacks and the Wellhausens, the anti-semites, whose theology led to the support of Hitler and the genocide of the Jews.  This is a terrible legacy and it is no wonder that some liberals would want to revise history and expropriate Bonhoeffer for themselves.

Resources:
HITLER’S THEOLOGIANS: The Genesis of Genocide
by Stan Meyer

Was Bonhoeffer an Evangelical?

Belief in Action review by Joseph Loconte in WSJ

Bonhoeffer: Liberal, Evangelical, or None of the Above?

Appendix: I made the following comment at the City of God to Dan’s post:  News flash:  Non-evangelicals are non-evangelical, which suggested that Bonhoeffer and C. S. Lewis were not evangelicals, depending on the definition, and which occasioned my above reflexions:

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