Despite Middle Finger Mary and a few others, respondents seem more interested in economics than politics, so I'll head back in that direction - more specifically towards inflation and the possibility of a second price revolution. Indeed, perhaps I should say economic history as opposed to economics.

My subject matter in this week guest chair -- "financialization" -- had its genesis when I used that word in my 1993 book Boiling Point: Democrats, Republicans and the Decline of Middle Class Prosperity. I had thought I used it first in a 1994 book, Arrogant Capital: Washington, Wall Street and the Frustration of American Politics. But when I Googled the term, Boiling Point was credited. Some time this month, the financialization sections of Boiling Point, Arrogant Capital and Wealth and Democracy (2002) will be scanned onto the Bad Money website (Bad-Money.com). Those interested can trace the crystallizing perception of the phenomenon and its dangers.

Readers will see that my fear of financialization was informed by the history of related excesses in the prior leading world economic powers, Britain, Holland and Spain. These I had pursued earlier. In 1982, both through commentaries and in an early book, Post-Conservative America - so named to identify the radical origins of the California tax revolt and supply-side economics - I raised the possibility that the inflationary and unsettling period from the Vietnam War to 1981 marked the beginning of something akin to the "price revolution" upheaval of 16th and early 17th century Europe.

Let me underscore. This is no minor historical backwater. The New Cambridge Modern History even splits the 16th Century volume's title: The Counter-Reformation and the Price Revolution, 1559-1610. In his preface, the volume's editor noted that "We no longer regard the 'price revolution' as solely the product of the sudden influx of silver from America" but also as a reflection of "deeper and longer-term movements of population, of trade and of finance."

Twenty-seven years after lightly raising a potential U.S./global parallel in 1982, I decided to pursue the analogy - the case for a second Pri ce Revolution based on the rise of Asia instead of Europe - in some depth in the new 2009 edition of Bad Money. Based on an April 8 interview on the new material, Reuters ran an April 9 story which headlined my sense of the inflation threat but did not give any detail. That's fair enough, because I didn't try to describe the thesis as set out in 6-8 pages. Basically , and admittedly over-simplified, it's that the rise of Asia since the 1960s, including oil and commodities pressures and broader military conflicts and economic rivalries, has set in motion another 50-70-year round of off-and-on price inflation beginning in 1965-66, continuing to 1981, then with a suspension in the 1980s and 1990s, but then resuming in the 2002-2003 period. It may run through 2025-2030. The doubter may look at the CRB Commodity Price Index (a chart appears on page lviii of the new preface).

In mid-2008, while Fed chairman Ben Bernanke and his FRB sidekicks were still pretending that public inflationary expectations were "anchored," the International Monetary Fund - less wrapped up in U.S. statistical pretenses -- described the trend as the "broadest and most buoyant commodity price boom since the early 1970s." If this overview is correct, and I think it was (and is), then the commodity price implosion that jogged along with the recession from the winter of 2007-2008 through 2009 will probably give way to renewed upward price pressures in 2009 or 2010. Readers may want to look at p. lx of the new Bad Money preface to see how commodity prices plummeted during the 1973-75 recession period and then bounced up again in 1975-80 during the stagflationary recovery as the commodity up-cycle resurged with the economy. Not a few commodity traders already see a winter 2008/2009 bottom in commodity prices taking shape.

During the 1970s, this pattern prevailed despite - and here again we should underscore - ongoing deflation (especially in price-adjusted terms) in stocks and bonds. No such historical analogy is ever altogether complete, but it is certainly intriguing. Let me add that the notion of a global price revolution centered on the rise of Asia can be supported indirectly by the post-1950 history of how so many economic circumstances of the United States were Asian - wars in Korea and Vietnam and the latter's inflationary outcome, the OPEC (Persian Gulf-centered) price jolts and recessions of 1973-74 and 1979-80, the Gulf War (1990-91), the Asia and Russian crises (1998), the Al Qaeda Twin Towers attack of 2001, the U.S. military imbroglios in Afghanistan and Iraq, the 2003-2008 commodity price surge and the related strategic gambits of Russia and China. In 2008, Asian nations had the highest inflation rates, and probably will again for the twelve full months of 2009.

If so, alas, the embarrassment of central banks worldwide will be keynoted by the pre-eminent culpability of our very own Federal Reserve.

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Kevin Phillips's 2008 bestseller Bad Money was released in a new and expanded (paperback) edition on March 31.