Nouriel Roubini: US faces inflation or default

05-07-2010 • gulfnews.com/business/

So, there is a massive buildup of public debt. And the lesson of history is that unless this buildup of sovereign debt is tackled eventually by raising taxes and controlling spending, then there are only two outcomes: default or high inflation. Historically, we have seen a series of defaults and sovereign debt crises in both advanced and emerging market economies. If you are a country like the US, the UK or Japan that can monetise its fiscal deficits, then you won't have a sovereign debt event but high inflation that erodes the value of public debt. Inflation is therefore basically a capital transfer from creditors and savers to borrowers and dissavers, essentially from the private sector to the government. While the markets these days are worrying about Greece, it is only the tip of the iceberg, or the canary in the coal mine of a much broader range of fiscal crises. Today it is Greece. Tomorrow it will be Spain, Portugal, Ireland and Iceland. Sooner or later Japan and the US will be at the core of the problem, shaking the global economy.