That’s Erin Burnett holding up a $100 billion Zimbabwe bill.  It will buy you about three eggs.  Could the USA be on the road to becoming the next Zimbabwe?  Very doubtful.  But the threat of high inflation is very real, and that’s what prompted Burnett to display the bill during her Morning Joe appearance today. The CNBCer was responding to Joe Scarborough’s questioning about the inflationary risk created by the government’s decision, announced yesterday, to create $1 trillion out of thin air that it will use to buy  Treasury bonds and mortgage securities.

ERIN BURNETT: Now the Fed has come in and said, we’re going to put everything on the table. We’re going to put another trillion dollars in.  We’ve been calling that Monopoly money in a sense, right? We don’t have it. We’re printing it.

JOE SCARBOROUGH: How exactly does that work, Erin?  Do you just wake up one day and say we’re going to create a trillion dollars out of thin air?

BURNETT: Yeah, you go to actually, you know the official provider for the US Mint is Cranes [Crane & Co.] It’s a company based in New England. They actually, I guess, will print it.*

SCARBOROUGH: And that’s really great, because that will cause rampant inflation, won’t it?

BURNETT [facetiously]: Oh, no, no, no, no.

And a bit later . . .

BURNETT: Obviously, you have more dollars, that hurts the value of the dollar. We have a guest who’s going to come on today and talk about this dollar. This dollar, actually, this is $100 billion. Can you see it?  It is. So David Kotok of Cumberland Advisors is going to talk about this.  $100 billion.  It is a dollar. It happens to be a Zimbabwean dollar. Yes, that is an egregious example. But it does make the point of the risks down the road.

Maybe we need to revise Everett Dirksen’s old saying to henceforth go: a trillion here, and a trillion there, and pretty soon you’re not talking about real money.

* Actually, the Treasury Department’s Bureau of Engraving and Printing will print the money.  Crane just provides the paper.  But Burnett’s basic point is well taken.