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The United States is in a very unique position in the world in that, regardless of who holds their debt, the majority of US debt is 'Priced' in the American dollar. This means that there is a certain incentive to devalue the American dollar, even if that means increasing the debt load. The unfortunate problem of this is that inflation is far more destructive to the poor and middle class than deflation is because they have far less control over their wages (so they don't increase at the rate of inflation) and a large portion of their investments do not perform well enough to beat inflation.