And which mega-corp is not already putting thousands of their employees on the street so that they can maintain a certain profit margin for parasitic shareholders and obscenely bloated CEO pay? Even Wal-Mart is in trouble. And if I recall correctly, the topic of the thread is the knowledge that we are already facing an economic meltdown. The question was how to save it.

And while my suggestion doesn't necessarily contribute to "saving" the economy on its face, at least the taxpayers won't be footing the bill to bail out the mega-corps that do go down, the "free market" having done its job of ridding itself of failures. Rather, taxing profits can go to paying our debts. Do you have any idea how little the mega-corps are paying in taxes? It's around 7% on average.

Seems to me the key to keeping the game going, is to maintain the purchase of US treasuries. Currently that is occuring by Asian countries that have a vested interest in using their extra $US dollars obtained by our Asian purchases, to buy US treasuries. That sops up extra dollars that would hit the forex market and cause the dollar to drop in value. In addition to sopping up dollars (from our huge trade deficit), the Asian countries purchases of US treasuries keeps bond prices up, and therefore long-term interest rates stay low. That keeps our economy putting along (mainly via the housing market, which keeps homeowners borrowing and spendiing). As long as Japan and China keep purchasing treasuries, we keep importing their goods.

What factor(s) might slow down Asian purchase of our treasuries? The only thing I can imagine, would be a willingness of China to become more independent, and not care as much about us buying their cheap goods. They are finding their own sources of commodities and purchasing their own companies which might make them feel more economically independent.

Anyway, for whatever reason that might slow down Asia purchase of US treasuries, my sense is we would find ways to surrepticiously purchase our own treasuries, using electronically issued ("printed") dollars. We could make very deep pockets for "hedge funds" located in the Cayman Islands, to become bidders in treasury auctions and keep the bond prices up.

Monetizing our own debt would of course be very inflationary, but it might keep the game going longer than we might imagine. Because we're not currently in an environment that perceives us to be inflationary (unlike the late '70's,), we might be able to sneak a lot more inflation into the system without people getting wise to is. Only recently has the price of gold become a canary in the mine to point out inflationary trends. Hiding M3 could be part of the plan to anticipate the need to monetize our debt.

Pardon my simplistic views - just my own recent ponderings, don't know how valid they are.

Silly question from somebody who doesn't understand much about economy: what is monetizing debt?