Somene says "Weimar" in print.

Rarely do I agree with someone about just about everything. This piece, by Liam Halligan of the Telegraph, comes close. Prize snippets follow; no colour needed.

The danger isn't deflation, but a surge of Weimar Republic-style inflation. The US authorities aren't lubricating the system, as they claim. They're flooding – drowning – their economy with cash. And they'll carry on doing so – pandering to Wall Street – until something forces them to stop.

That something could be the dollar – and even a US gilts strike. The yield on the 30-year US bond is now 2.6pc – the lowest for 50 years. Traders aren't buying those bonds because they think it's a good deal to collect 2.6pc on their money each year. They're buying them because, under intense pressure from bosses and regulators to "go safe", they're scared for their jobs.

Such forced buying and related low yields suggest the US Treasuries market is now a bubble. And bubbles always burst. The Fed is committed to buying long-term US government debt itself in huge quantities. But, as America's liabilities rise and the printing presses keep rolling, the dollar must surely keep falling. And as it does, the argument for holding US Treasuries collapses.

The danger looms that, pretty soon, the only net buyer of US Treasuries could be the Fed itself. Very serious questions would then be asked about America's ability to service its debt. Foreign creditors could start calling in the money they're owed by the States.

This scenario is alarming, but far from impossible. And the reason the world is flirting with this danger is because the Fed needs to fight deflation.

But the Fed's argument doesn't stack up. US inflation – as measured by the pre-Clinton methodology, before the politicians started messing with the numbers – stands at 4.5pc.

Deflation is being used as an excuse for the US authorities to print money like crazy, attempting to bury their mistakes and bail out their Wall Street friends. [Emph added].

Alright, a little bit of colour. Most of the above has been said before (although the mastheads are getting more respectable with time). What is more rarely expressed is the observation that managers are buying treasuries for ass-covering reasons. Amen to all that. It's quite true, especially around year-end. Fact is, no one has ever been fired for owning treasuries. The intermediation of real-estate lending was the root cause of the clusterf-ck. The intermediation of financial asset stewardship will make the mortgage fiasco seem like LTCM. And that's with Madoff already in the history books. You can argue that treasuries are not a bubble, but you can't argue they're not a crowded trade. PM's are drawn to crowded trades, I suppose, by definition (again, no one has every been fired for being center of the pack). Individuals? Less so. There is daylight between a professional's motivations and the motivations of those whose money the professional manages. When the money bubble turns, this will become more apparent and "riskless" will become a term laden with irony.