(If I had my own IT department, I might have posted more by now.)

If patience is a virtue, then I suppose it follows that one cannot have too much of it. As someone traveling the wrong way down the risk curve, though, I am beginning to experience the financial repression that the Federal Reserve is administering. Negative real interest rates may have been necessary for a time to avert a depression, but now I grow impatient for at least some small measure of return on my money.

The best case for someone like me – and there are some 10,000 more of us every day – would be for the Fed to finally succeed in its efforts to engineer a bit more inflation. Then, perhaps, the Fed might start to roll back its weapons of financial repression. The worst case for people like me would be for that inflation to become entrenched and start to compound to higher and higher rates.

If it is true as I believe that the financial crisis was mostly a function of increasing debt, shouldn’t one take comfort from the strengthening of household and business balance sheets since 2008? Probably not, since government debt has more than filled the breach. True, private sector debt is more dangerous than public debt, but only because government treasuries can always debase their currencies. Outside of the Swiss National Bank, who isn’t engaged in that competition today?

It might seem an odd time to worry about inflation, with oil and commodities prices under pressure, but that’s what I find myself worrying about these days. If inflation does finally show up, and the Fed’s tightening measures aren’t up to the job, the big bear market in bonds will have arrived. One can only hope that equities will prove to be the hedge against inflation they are reputed to be. If inflation goes high enough, of course, there is no guarantee that stock prices won’t join bonds on the road to perdition. Much as they have together ridden higher over the past 30+ years.