Thanks.

Thank you. Seeing as how we have this page to ourselves, have you ever read The Theory of Elementary Waves: A New Explanation of Fundamental Physics, by Lewis Little? It is, as its name implies, a different take on physics. It is not a long book and would probably be a short read for someone of your background. It's proving to be a longer read for someone of my background. However, it's pretty interesting and it deals with a lot of the logical conundrums built into contemporary physics. You might want to take a look; it's on Amazon.

Some debt will get paid off, most will get rescheduled, repudiated, or written off.

We are not seeing inflation because across the global economy, the marginal value of debt is now negative. If you think of debt as a factor of production, rates of return have equilibrated with artificially low interest rates, so the expected rate of return for either speculation or production now does not exceed the costs of debt (interest and debt repayment). In fact, present debt burdens, having been incurred at a far faster rate than underlying economic growth, are onerous, especially debt incurred for consumption, for which there is no economic return.

So most private economic entities are trying to either reduce their debt or at least not incur more of it. The only entities still aggressively increasing debt are central banks and governments, who are insensitive to economic considerations. For their debt to have expansionary economic effects, private entites must be willing to expand their debt. The Fed buying up government bonds (actually exchanging its fiat debt for the government's fiat debt) can only increase nominal economic activity and prices if the bank reserves it creates serve as a basis for loan expansion in the real economy. That is not happening now, or is only happening at an anemic rates depending on the country, which is a primary reason economic activity is weak and there has not been the oft predicted resurgence of inflation. When total debt actually begins to contract, which has either started or will soon, it will be deflationary. Commodities prices since mid-2014 are the leading edge, just as house prices were last time. In both cases deflation began in one of the economies most leveraged, or indebted, sectors. That is typical of debt deflations.

For more, see the Debtonomics Archive on SLL.

Preparing taxes (aargh!) now, will have an explanation in a day or two.

In order to have inflation, the public needs to respond to government incentives the way government wants them to. If, instead of spending, they save and/or pay down their debt, then you'll get DEflation, in which the government will respond with more funding. To get inflation, the public must SPEND, not save or reduce debt.