Plundered to pay off others' debts

Another great article by Tom Paine at The Last Ditch:

Years ago, when I was a hard-working young family man of limited means and many outgoings, my wife and I lived in the other half of a semi-detached house from a retired industrialist and his wife. They were a lovely old couple and charming neighbours. Labour's hyper-inflation of the Denis Healey/IMF bailiffs era had reduced them from comfortably living on the interest from their life savings to genteel poverty on devalued and dwindling capital. This was the same inflation that wiped out the mortgages of my parents' generation, allowing them to pay for good houses with bad money.

My neighbours' life of work had been plundered to pay off others' debts. It was trans-generational piracy. Little did I know, foolishly confident as I was in the (then) political success of the doctrine of monetarism, that I was looking at my own fate. Yet "quantitative easing" is nothing but a fancy name for such inflationary policies and the gods of the marketplace will not be fooled by euphemism.