At long last, one writer has seriously addressed the potential problems with more stimulus spending. (I sent Paul Krugman a question about this more than a week ago, via a comment on his blog, but from what I can see he has yet to address it. And Dean Baker too easily dismisses the issue, in my opinion.)

The problem is not the federal budget deficit, not at least in the short term, but the potential political fallout from bad decision making. That way, says Steve Randy Waldman, indeed lay a possible US currency crisis. And this is ultimately where Friedrich Hayek and his associates were coming from in blaming Weimar for the disasters that followed.

The stock market roared, the regulators stirred, the unemployment rate soared and the banks continued to show great reluctance to lend money.

What else happened in 2009? Oh, right, there was a tremendous binge of book publishing related to the financial crisis that began in the summer of 2008 - and Henry Paulson's version of events isn't even out yet (coming soon - Feb. 1 - to a bookstore/online warehouse near you).