Oh and if there is a war it does not matter because Australia is just about all foreign owned so we will be safe

Christian, it's the current financial crisis in the USA [read US debt and current Fed response to debt meltdown] that is the CAUSE of this crack-up boom. The world is currently wash with US dollars! You've got petro-dollar nations and China sitting on mountains of US dollars as a result of the US trade deficit. The Fed has decided that the US dollar is going to devalue (inflation is always good for a debtor nation like the USA when it comes time to try to pay down that debt, so it's no accident that Bernanke isn't worried about the state of the dollar). So those SWFs (in China and petro $ nations) left holding mountains of devaluing US dollars not worth the paper it's printed on, need to exchange those increasingly worthless dollars for tangibles to hedge the ever-dwindling worth of the US dollar, and they've chosen things like food energy and metals. Foreign Central Banks awash with US dollars have also been bizarrely buying US treasuries en masse and consequently causing interest rates to drop to the point where the only reason you would invest in US treasuries is that you would be assured (theoretically) of getting your money back. This being the case, it is no wonder that hedge funds around the world plus investment institutions (including those in the USA like pension funds for instance) are looking to other ways of increasing returns on their money too! Hello commodities!

Yesterday the U.S. Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs held a hearing titled, "Financial Speculation in Commodity Markets: Are Institutional Investors and Hedge Funds Contributing to Food and Energy Price Inflation?" You can watch the full hearing on a vidcast here:

http://hsgac.senate.gov/public/audio_video/052008video.ram (requires real media player)

The best bit was the testimony of Michael Masters. Here is it is pdf form (a rivetting read):

http://hsgac.senate.gov/public/_files/052008Masters.pdf

Yep, it's a Von Mises crackup boom alright.

i'm not sure how america could partake in a global crackup boom simply because most are indebt and have no savings, so our markets won't reach the high's that say the japanese or others would. gold and silver and real estate may become a solid store of value, but the bankers are adverse to getting people to see either as a store of wealth (they would prefer investment in intagnibles) and use repos to intermitently attack asset prices in certain sectors. i would invest in food and guns and buying land in a country like iceland which probably won't be as effected by war.

Preventing those instabilities necessarily arises from the combining of payment and billing with respect to time and/or space.

The time for the zero dollar bill is now come.

And every country on the planet is printing money like crazy !

And the US is soo deeply in debt, it can never see a way out butt to default.

And a lot of really funny financing is falling apart,, due to falling equity values in the housing market..

And I have all my money in the stock market..International Index,, and Value mostly.

About 1/2 in Energy.

I suspect the only thing that will hold value when this thing goes plop,, is gold, and I dont see anybody else buying gold, so I sure as hell am not going to buy any...I dont want anyone to think I'm crazy..

Dam ! I'm rambling..

All they have for proof of substance is numbers on paper and well-paid credent idiots to enforce it, but as you more or less have stated, once the credent idiots are no longer credent, then the phony paper will simply be burned or deleted. The world has needed that for a long, long, time and the reason it is near to happening now is that since 2000 those who do not merit such wealth have lost all common sense, proportion and persepective and are at present hurtling at breakneck speed towards their own social and physical doom. Watch what happens when they attack Iran. A bunch of them will suddenly disappear immediately, and things will quickly go downhill for them from there. Though I own property and would appear to benefit from their present system, I am really looking forward to the coming anti-globalist smackdown, because there would be so much more to my life if they were not in power in this world. Simply put, it has been impossible to compete economically on an equal footing with people who simply print money up and hand it to themselves, and we all know that that is exactly what has been happening with the Fed for over 50 years now. I would really like to see every single living Fed governor since Day One hung for treason, over and out. No passes shall be allowed for such pernicious evil. It is time for a big, big change.