The worrisome, if not quite worst-case, scenario is this: We start to suffer genuinely problematic inflation, the Fed jacks up interest rates to stabilize prices, the cost of borrowing for the U.S. government goes up substantially, the cost of financing the debt rises from 8 percent of the budget to 12 percent of the budget and then appears set to keep on marching up from there, the economy goes into recession, and Washington has a choice — it can cut back spending during a recession, thereby almost certainly deepening that recession, or it can go even more deeply into debt at a time when the cost of debt service already is climbing, thereby making both the total debt and the cost of financing it that much worse. This is where fiscal crises and sovereign-debt crises come from. Inflation is destructive in and of itself — but it also is a trigger that brings into play other economic forces that can bring with them unpredictable and at times destructive outcomes. The 2001 recession was an unintended consequence of policies meant to stabilize the economy. The financial crisis and the Great Recession were, at least in part, the unintended consequences of policies meant to make it easier to buy a house and to make mortgage-lending less risky for financial institutions.