In an Op-Ed  piece in The New York Times, Paul Volcker, chairman of the Federal Reserve during 1979- 1987, issued an eloquent warning against economic policymakers deliberately increasing the inflation rate as a way of dealing with escalating economic and fiscal problems that have defied all other policy measures. Volcker’s Op-Ed, entitled, “A Little Inflation Can Be a Dangerous Thing,” warrants serious reading by all concerned with the global economic crisis. Paul Volcker knows what he is talking about; it was he as Fed Chairman during the Reagan administration who squeezed high inflation out of the U.S. economy through a draconian process of high interest rates.

Here are extracts of what Volcker wrote in his Op-Ed piece:

“There is great and understandable disappointment about high unemployment and the absence of a robust economy, and even concern about the possibility of a renewed downturn. There is also a sense of desperation that both monetary and fiscal policy have almost exhausted their potential, given the size of the fiscal deficits and the already extremely low level of interest rates.

“So now we are beginning to hear murmurings about the possible invigorating effects of ‘just a little inflation.’ Perhaps 4 or 5 percent a year would be just the thing to deal with the overhang of debt and encourage the ‘animal spirits’ of business, or so the argument goes… Some mathematical models spawned in academic seminars might support this scenario. But all of our economic history says it won’t work that way. I thought we learned that lesson in the 1970s. That’s when the word stagflation was invented to describe a truly ugly combination of rising inflation and stunted growth… At a time when foreign countries own trillions of our dollars, when we are dependent on borrowing still more abroad, and when the whole world counts on the dollar’s maintaining its purchasing power, taking on the risks of deliberately promoting inflation would be simply irresponsible.”

In particular, due to the global sovereign debt crisis, economists and policymakers are discussing behind closed doors the desirability of a 5-6 percent annual inflation rate as a way of reducing the burden of national debts in advanced economies. As if the experience of Weimar Germany and Zimbabwe wasn’t enough to show the irrationality of such an approach, Paul Volcker again reminds us of the futility of engineering deliberate inflation as a policy “cure” for our economic woes. One can only hope that the former Fed Chairman’s clear warning is heeded.

“We witnessed the collapse of the financial system…it was placed on life support, and it’s still on life support. There’s no sign that we are anywhere near a bottom,” stated Mr. Soros with emphasis. Not to be outdone, fellow participant at this nifty dinner pow-wow at Columbia University, former Fed Chairman and current senior advisor to President Barack Obama, the illustrious Paul Volcker, added the morose observation that, “I don’t remember any time, maybe even in the Great Depression, when things went down quite so fast, quite so uniformly around the world.”

When men as astute and intimately connected to global finance as Paul Volcker and George Soros are openly talking about the Global Economic Crisis as being “worse than the Great Depression” and having brought about the “disintegration” of the global financial architecture, it is clear that the most dire forecasts for the global economy can no longer be treated as uninformed hyperbole. The most knowledgeable and well-connected financiers on the planet are already preaching the gospel of economic and financial Armageddon.

Soros has also written in the Huffington Post a reflection based on simple math that outlines why the Global Economic Crisis, at least in the United States, will have an economically destructive impact that eclipses the Great Depression. He points out that at the time of the stock market crash on Wall Street in 1929, outstanding credit represented 160% of the U.S. GDP; this figure grew to 260% in 1932 as GDP contracted. Soros, however, writes that America “…entered into the Crash of 2008 at 365 percent, which is bound to rise to 500 percent or more by the time the full effect is felt.”

How should we interpret the musings of Soros and Volcker? In my view, we ignore their informed observations at our peril. Their stated views are not uninformed speculation, but rather a reflection from those in the eye of the storm of this global economic tsunami. Furthermore, despite continued happy talk from the inept political actors across the globe, those who inhabit the rarefied world of high finance, observing the Global Economic Crisis unfold from the pinnacle of power, do not harbor in the least a hint of optimism-or illusion.