Austrian economists have been crying doom over inflation fears for 3 years now, but none of it has materialized. They've also been insisting that bond yields were going to go through the roof any day now due to the Fed's inflationary policies, yet many years later, the yield for 7 and 10 year teasuries was *negative*. People have been paying a premium to park their money in U.S. Treasuries long-term.

The idea that nobody saw the collapse coming is preposterous. Many prominent Keynesians saw the housing collapse coming a long time before it happened -- Nouriel Roubini and Paul Krugman chief among them. They were called Cassandras at the time, but they ended up being right, and they weren't alone.

So yeah, guys like Schiff got it right too, but Cassandras don't get credit for being right if the methods they used to arrive at their correct conclusion are ultimately proven wrong, and time and time again, inflation hawks have predicted dire consequences of the Fed's actions that have not actually happened. At some point, one loses patience taking their arguments seriously. I probably could have used a more artful term than "crank", but, seriously, the Austrian guys are trying my patience about as much as climate skeptics these days. (BTW, bad week for those guys.)

Prices are rising because the Fed is pursuing a long-term inflation target of around 2%. There will be individual months where prices rise faster than that, but that's the target they're aiming for. So yes, prices are on a long-term rise, and that's not by accident -- the Fed *wants* inflation, and it's gettting about the rate it wants.

I do think for myself, and I've got a coworker who feeds me with a lot of thoughtful, well-argued stuff from the Austrian perspective -- but while Austrians start out with principles that make sense in the gut, they don't end up with models that match up with the real world. Keynesians don't always get it right, either, but in a choice between letting one out of every ten Americans sit idle or borrowing money cheaply to pay them to work, I'm going to choose the latter.

(And you still haven't backed up your "nearly 50%" statement.)