> The eye-popping reading – which marked the eighth consecutive month the gauge has been above 5% – will likely amp up pressure on the Federal Reserve to chart a more aggressive course in normalizing monetary policy. The Fed is going to *STRONGLY* resist raising rates enough to contain inflation. The problem is government debt. With the effective interest rate on US government debt today at about 1.7% we're paying a little over $500 billion in interest per year. If interest rates were to move like they did with Paul Volker's success in taming inflation our debt service would cost $4.5 trillion or more. That's more than the government collects in revenue. We'd have to borrow money just to pay our loans and there'd literally not be a cent left for anything else. We're either going to have to default or suffer the effects of runaway inflation. Get some wheelbarrows ready for when you need to carry enough cash to the store to buy some beer. The Fed and the US government have put us in a situation that has no way out other than catastrophic economic collapse. They've been warned for decades and nobody did a damn thing to stop it - not Republicans or Democrats. The fingerpointing is going to be insufferable. The one thing you can be sure of is that no fingers will be pointing at the culprits.