The Inflation Monster How Monetary Policy Threatens Savings

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http://www.spiegel.de/international/europe/how-central-banks-are-threatening-the-savings-of-normal-germans-a-860021.html

Germany's central bank, the Bundesbank, has established a museum devoted to money next to its headquarters in Frankfurt. It includes displays of Brutus coins from the Roman era to commemorate the murder of Julius Caesar, as well as a 14th-century Chinese kuan banknote. There is one central message that the country's monetary watchdogs seek to convey with the exhibit: Only stable money is good money. And confidence is needed in order to create that good money.

The confidence of visitors, however, is seriously shaken in the museum shop, just before the exit, where, for €8.95 ($11.65) they can buy a quarter of a million euros, shredded into tiny pieces and sealed into plastic. It's meant as a gag gift, but the sight of this stack of colorful bits of currency could lead some to arrive at a simple and disturbing conclusion: A banknote is essentially nothing more than a piece of printed paper.
It has been years since Germans harbored the kind of substantial doubts about the value of their currency that they have today in the midst of the debt crisis. A poll conducted in September by Faktenkontor, a consulting company, and the market research firm Toluna, found that one in four Germans is already trying to protect his or her assets from the threat of inflation by investing in material assets, for example.

Germans Fear Assets at Risk

The German economy may be doing relatively well, with low unemployment and better economic performance than in many other industrialized countries. But Germans sense that they will end up paying for the current debt crisis, one in which politicians and monetary watchdogs are playing for time, through inflation that will gradually reduce the value of their savings.

[Lefty Thinker]

1. A crisis of their own making

All Eurozone participants agreed to give up their monetary sovereignty (bad choice!) when joining the club. It would have been a more tolerable situation if they had implemented a fiscal as well as monetary union but that did not happen. The system was designed such that it is guaranteed to induce deflationary pressure on the currency at the cost of high unemployment in the case of a demand failure. This protects the value of the money hoarded by the wealthy right up until the revolutionaries start collecting heads.

Those who accumulate wealth do need to take responsibility for the economic situation of their countries...out of self preservation if no other reason. If an unfair culture allows you to become wealthy, will the poor respect your wealth when they have nothing to eat? I highly doubt it, but I may have too much self-respect.