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Sri Lanka is having a textbook currency crisis, triggered by policy mistakes

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Re: Sri Lanka is having a textbook currency crisis, triggered by policy mistakes

#381

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>the public sentiment forced her hand after Fukushima though I wonder how many people died in Fukushima vs how many Ukrainians were killed by Russian soldiers this year.

The problem for Germany, and Europe more broadly, is that nuclear power stations don't create natural gas. Electricity and natural gas aren't interchangeable commodities, particularly given Germany's infrastructure.

They can be used to create hydrogen however which can substitute for many energy uses that currently consume natural gas.

Also Europe produces a lot of electricity with natural gas fuelled turbines.

Re: Sri Lanka is having a textbook currency crisis, triggered by policy mistakes

#382
post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not just a dictatorship problem. Look at the halting of nuclear in Germany - a decision made by Angela Merkel after a bottle of wine with her husband according to The Atlantic. I would argue that the current energy crisis was also partly caused by the ESG drive which while laudable in aspiration got ahead of physical practical implementation capacity.

Large scale buildouts of natural gas infrastructure is not ESG. I know it is tempting to pin this one on the environmentalists, but this is on the establishment. Starting with Schröder who realized he could find an easy way to keep German industry competitive and line his pockets and live a comfortable life forever. This is similar to the Sri Lankan situation. It does not matter how you label it. The lack of fertiliz…

Substituting electricity made at natural gas fuelled power stations for electricity made at coal fuelled power stations does however result in large carbon emission reductions and is seen as ESG (or was prior to Russia's invasion of Ukraine anyway)

Re: Sri Lanka is having a textbook currency crisis, triggered by policy mistakes

#383
post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not producing enough food is pretty normal. In my native Norway we have not been self sufficient in hundreds of years. Only 2.5% of the land is arable. Any time there was a serious war and shipping lanes got blocked like in Napoleonic wars we got into deep trouble. Plenty of people died. Same deal in the Netherlands. They were not self sufficient in their Golden age. The Soviet Union was not self-sufficient. It was a…

> The US cannot have this problem since it controls the world reserve-currency you got that the wrong way around. The US has the world reserve _because_ it cannot have this problem (of not having enough domestic production of necessities). The world isn't entirely controlled by the US - even though they do dictate a large portion of financial policy all over the world, the countries of the world decided to use the US…

> […] the countries of the world decided to use the US currency as an intermediary because of the stability and assurances (that has recently been shocked by financial sanctions of magnitudes never seen before).

After WWII, the world agreed to use the US Dollar as reserve currency because the US promised to exchange every 35 USD for one troy ounce of gold, as per the Bretton Woods agreement.

And when the US defaulted on this obligation in 1971 the world continued using the USD since there was no other politically viable alternative.

Re: Sri Lanka is having a textbook currency crisis, triggered by policy mistakes

#384

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's why subsidies bad and subsidies good are a false dilemma. "Spending money well" might seem like an obvious solution but it runs up against the problem of corrupt politicians, of which there are many. Hence, we have (worldwide) politicians handing out money to places they are (probably) needed (in your example, the agriculture subsidies) and places they are not (Walmart and similar McJobs), and it's possible th…

The Democrats don't believe in subsidies for everything all the time, nor do they ever campaign on that. Some republicans simply say "stop government handouts" they don't say "Some government handouts are good but we need to control it"

Were you meant to reply to me? I didn't mention either party and I'm not an American. It may be a serendipitous mistake though, as it has uncovered an obvious bias that you should address.

Re: Sri Lanka is having a textbook currency crisis, triggered by policy mistakes

#385

The first part of the article about how Sri Lanka would get foreign currency (swap, export or borrow) almost completely ignores the well documented devastation of the tourist industry, where people bring euros or dollars, due to covid19 and shutdowns of travel. Yes I suppose it falls into the category of swap, because people bring euros and exchange them for local currency to buy local goods and services. But it was…

It's mentioned later in the article, and while it's certainly a factor, there are a lot of other countries with an even larger dependence on tourism (Maldives, Fiji, Thailand, etc) that did not suffer a full blown economic crisis as a result.

Havent had a crisis yet*

Re: Sri Lanka is having a textbook currency crisis, triggered by policy mistakes

#386
post #335

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The UK produces a surplus of animal shit; I don't understand why it isn't all being used to fertilize the ground. For that matter, I don't understand why human poo is treated as pollution, rather than being composted.

Because synthetic fertilizer is better in %effect/$cost, if you exclude externalities at least. If you would include nitrogen pollution and use of fossil fuels/CO2 production into the cost, using natural fertilizer would be a no-brainer.

Add in the cost of the human waste disposal that you make unnecessary (ah, I guess that's the "nitrogen pollution" bit). But I understand that phosphates are at least as serious a problem; and I believe nitrates are much less persistent than phosphates.

If I remember a fragment of chemistry from 50 years ago, it's something like "all inorganic nitrate salts are soluble in water at STC". Ammonia's also water-soluble (and volatile); rivers and groundwater can recover from nitrogen pollution more quickly than from phosphate pollution.

One other thing: phosphate fertilisers basically have to be dug out of the ground, and as reserves begin to run low, prices are increasing. But human poo is very high in phosphates.

I mean, even if there's a yick factor, let's face it: every glass of water we drink, whether from the tap or the mineral spring, has probably passed through the kidneys of dozens of animals, including fish, mammals and insects, and certainly hundreds of dinosaurs and millions of bateria. Why should we be concerned if the phosphate salt we use was once a part of human poo, which probably contained nasties at some point? And nobody's proposing that humans should chow-down on phosphate salts extracted from human poo; stick to bananas, and put the fertiliser on the banana tree.

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