- It’s just embarrassing at this point. How long will the Americans put up with this humiliation ritual?
- As long as a significant portion of the population continues voting for it.
- Well let’s hope, as Bush once said, “Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice… can’t get fooled again.”
- Hopefully. They've bene fooled into voting for him 3 times already.
- If you take Russia as a boilerplate; never. Trump will "trickle down" the corruption to just enough people to keep everyone complacent and do as he wills.
- So many people make so much money from it. I don’t personally this time but I did last time working for tech. Maybe I will again next time. This is the third time America been “humiliated” in my life and my life is awesome and getting better.
/s
But that is the overall sentiment if I had to describe it without pretense
- Is it just me, or are we taking the beginning of Iraq War v 2 very calmly?
- Wars are waged through inflation. Allowing the federal government to "print money", essentially write checks on a negative account balance, is funding these forever wars.
If you continue to support reckless taxation, this is what you will get.
- IIRC, the US debt is at 39 trillion right now, with no plan to pay it back. Which is logical, because it's unpayable. There's no way in the world that will ever be paid back. I still haven't seen anybody properly analyze how high the debt can go before it actually can't go any higher, but we're going to find out.
- Without any funny business (meaning no re-valuation of the debt, which I guess there are strategies for) and assuming an interest rate on the debt of between 3-5%, I figured between 10-20 years before the interest payments eat up most essential services.
- Monetize it or default are the only options I think. Monetizing affects everyone while default only (directly) affects bond holders. Monetizing is much easier to obfuscate though so that is probably what will happen.
- Perhaps, but the monetization would have to be pretty extreme. And that would send interest rates to the moon, making further borrowing difficult.
While these things are impossible to predict, my guess is that in a couple decades the government will do some sort of technical default. Force Treasury bond holders to exchange their current holdings at par for new bonds with longer maturities and artificially low interest rates. Politicians will be able to claim that no one has lost money since the nominal bond values will remain the same even though the market values will be much lower.
The other thing I expect to happen is that the government will force retirement accounts (both defined benefit pension plans and defined contribution 401k plans) to purchase Treasury bonds. Because of course they're so much "safer" for retirees than risky stocks.
- the US has run deficits for years, so it's not reckless taxation in the form I think you mean. "Pay for its bills" would be a novel concept, involving undoing various "give money to rich people" tax cuts.
In the current environment, very unlikely.
38 points by cdrnsf 2 hours ago | 13 comments