The Big Hangover: Finland and Bikini Economics

“These are my good clothes. You can’t go home smelling like a meth lab.” – Breaking Bad

Say what you want about Finland, but their flag is a big plus.

Finland had originally not wanted to be involved at all in war, but the Soviets had attacked them in 1940.  Joseph Stalin had come to the conclusion that he was tired of Finns living on land he wanted, and attacked.  You could say that Stalin was Russian to the Finnish line.

Stalin expected the Soviet juggernaut to wipe Finland off the map in 1940.  Thus began what is known as the “Winter War” to protect Finland.

Did anyone come to the aid of Finland?  No, not really.  Churchill and Roosevelt were certainly sympathetic in the newspapers, but just made sad clucking noises as the Red Army prepared to assimilate yet another country.

Finland was horribly outnumbered.  For instance, the Soviets invaded with 3,880 aircraft.   The Finns had 114 planes.  The Soviets had a maximum of 6,500 tanks, the Finns had 32.  Yes, 32 tanks.

This is the recipe for a huge loss, but the Finns had other ideas – they were fighting to save Finland.

They inflicted over 300,000 Soviet casualties with only 300,000 Finnish soldiers.  The Soviets agreed to a peace treaty, taking over several islands and provinces, far short of their actual war effort.  Rumor has it that the Soviets decided they wanted peace after Christopher Lee (yes, that Christopher Lee) arrived from England as a volunteer to fight for the Finns.

How could they tell Dracula had a sore throat?  The coffin.

At the outbreak of the German invasion of the Soviet Union two years later, the Finns jumped in:  they retook the provinces that the Soviets took, but stopped.  Finland basically relaxed until, in 1944, the Soviets had the Germans on the run.  Stalin looked at Finland and described a Scandinavian church song:  Finnish Hymn.

This brings us to Aimo Koivunen.  Aimo was a corporal in the Finnish Army, and was sent on a ski patrol in March of 1944.  He and his patrol were suddenly surrounded by Soviet troops.  They managed to escape, but Aimo was dead tired from the physical exertion of skiing away from the pursuing Soviet troops.

Sorry, I guess that skiing joke went downhill fast.

Aimo had Pervitin©.  Pervitin™ was issued to some troops to overcome exhaustion and remain awake on guard duty.  Since Pervitin® was essentially crystal meth, the instructions said to just take one.  It was cold.  Aimo was tired.  He couldn’t just grasp one of the pills, so he took the entire bottle.  All 30.

That’s when the fun started.

Aimo became delirious, and the next little bit is fuzzy.  All he knows is that when he woke up less than a day later, he’d skied 60 miles and lost all of his equipment.  He hit a landmine, but that was no impediment for a meth-crazed Finn.  He just spent time in a ditch eating pine nuts and a raw bird that he caught.

Aimo ended up skiing another 190 miles (not kilometers, miles) for a grand total of 250 miles.

In March.

In Finland.

On enough meth to kill a college football team.

Okay, Aimo had more adventure in two weeks than most people have in a lifetime.  He even remembered some of it.

When they finally managed to wrestle the still meth-addled Aimo into the hospital, he had a heart rate of 200 beats per minute (three times a non-meth-saturated-human heartrate).  He weighed 94 pounds, and in the one time I don’t make fun of communist units, that’s only 43 kilograms.

That’s one hell of a hangover.

Oh, sure, I could have told a funny story that describes why I don’t drink tequila, ever, but I thought that Aimo Kiovunen’s story was a better one than I’ll ever have.  So you get that instead.

But what does a meth-soaked soldier have to do with the economy?

In the last decade, our economy has just gulped down about 30 Pervitinâ„¢.

Part of the problem was that our economy was almost already exhausted before the Coronavirus hit.  The economic expansion since the Great Recession was already 128 months old in February 2020 – the longest in United States history.  How did it get that old?

Simulants.  The biggest stimulant was economic policy.  If you wanted to buy a house in 1990, you’d pay 10% interest rates.  Buying a house in 2010, the interest rates were around 4%.  Now?  Even lower.  The Federal Reserve’s® interest rate is zero, if you’re a big bank.  Free money.

Zero interest rate?  A stimulant.

In the last year, deficit spending of the United States has been in the trillions.  $3.8 trillion, to be exact.  In one year.  That’s three times the level of deficit spending in the Great Recession.

How is that for 30 capsules of Pervitinâ„¢ in 2020 after chugging two dozen pots of coffee since 2008?

Never has so much amazingly frightening debt ever looked so good.

You simply cannot put that level of stimulant into an economy and not expect to have an impact.  What’s the impact?

As commenters have noted, the stimulant effect of all of that money dumped into the economy has been muted somewhat because people just aren’t spending it.  There are a variety of reasons for this.  Unemployed people don’t go tossing all of their 401k money into fishing boats and rare PEZ® dispensers depicting Norwegian War Heroes.

The bigger pools, though, are rich people waiting to scoop up depressed assets.  Another pool consists of money that the banks borrowed from the Fed® at zero interest, and then deposited back with the Fed© to earn interest.  This is not a trick that you or I could do, but it props up the banks.

Not one of my more successful pickup lines.

The concern I have is that once the signs of inflation show up, those pools of money will begin to move.  At first with a trickle, and then with an avalanche.  The stimulant will take effect.  And the heartrate of the economy will go to 200 beats per minute (0.2 kilobeats per minute).

There is good news.  You can look for the signs that I’m right, say, gold going up in price.  Or bitcoin going through the roof.  That might be the sign the hangover from the Pervitin© is taking hold in the economy.

Oh, those things are happening?  Keep your eyes open, folks.

The good news is that, despite his adventures in creative pharmacology, Aimo Koivunen lived to be 71.  He survived the hangover.

Let’s hope we do, too.