We keep having bad dreams about all the phony money central banks are creating to ‘fix’ the economy. This is not a figure of speech. We are actually having nightmares about this. We wake up in cold sweats.

The thing that bothers us most is the supposed solution to the problem – more easy money – is also the intrinsic cause. Governments around the world want to “reinflate” the economy. But we know there’s a fine line between “reinflation” and “inflation.” Hence our uneasy sleep.

Will’s father, Bill, has made a quick tally of the funny money entering the system. “The US Federal Reserve,” he writes in The Daily Reckoning, “has been authorized to “print” $1.75 trillion worth of new money in order to buy Treasury bonds. The Bank of England has its own program – worth £75 billion, so far. Even Switzerland has been printing money – so much that its money supply, as measured by M2, is growing at 30% per year. And two weeks ago, the European Central Bank announced that it too would begin creating money in order to buy corporate bonds.”

The question, of course, is where does this money go after it is born? And what effect does it have on the economy?

We like to call all this newly printed money “Abracadabra money.” Bill is more direct. He calls it “counterfeit money.” But whatever you call it, determining where it will end up and what kind of trouble it will cause is never straightforward. It seems like Bill is having nightmares too.

We thought the Bubble Epoch was the peak in claptrap and illusions. But we were only in the foothills. The feds now pretend to bail out the economy by giving money to companies that pretend to be concerned, run by people who pretend to know what they are doing. And when they run short of money, they create more of it, pretend it is real… and pretend they can tell it what to do.

What is likely is that money will have a mind of its own. First, the markets will react…and the authorities will not. They will remember their own critiques of Japanese and Roosevelt-era monetary policy. In both cases, they believe central banks removed the punch bowl too early – before the party really got rolling. In both cases, the recovery was cut off.

Then, while they are hesitating, money will turn on them. Inflation rates will rise further. The velocity of money will pick up. And investors – including foreign governments – will become eager sellers of government debt. Suddenly, it will be too late. In order to remove the monetary inflation they previously added, central banks will have to sell bonds, instead of buying them, trying to reabsorb money from the economy. The extra cash will then disappear back into the central banks. But in order to bring inflation under control, the biggest bond buyers in the world must turn into the world’s biggest sellers. Bond prices, already falling as investors fear the worst, will collapse immediately. An avalanche of dollars will fall upon the world markets – as dollar holders all over the world become desperate to get rid of them.

We don’t know what day it will happen. But we have a good idea as to what time of day central bankers will realize that they are doomed. About 4am is our guess. That is the moment when Ben Bernanke and other central bankers begin to feel like members of the Donner Party.