What is the sudden death syndrome?
The life-span of the regime of irredeemable currency may be extended through machinations such as the artificial stifling of demand for gold, or trying to satisfy this demand with paper gold. Other stratagems serving the same end are: the manipulation of interest rates in order to boost demand for bonds artificially; the manipulation of interest-rate spreads to offer risk-free profit to the carry trade; allowing the derivative markets on bonds to grow beyond any conceivable limit. These manipulations, machinations and stratagems can certainly put off the day of reckoning. However, there is a cost: it makes the inevitable credit collapse, whenever it may come, a great deal more painful, and recovery ever more protracted. The one certain result is that the sudden death syndrome will hit the currency when it is most vulnerable and disaster is least expected. We should remember that every experiment in history with irredeemable currency has ended in a cataclysm unless the currency was stab
