Where has all the money in the world gone?

Also only among conservatives; don't paint everyone with that brush. They are only half the USA.

Okay, mine sounds a bit racist too. Well, actually I think it really does a lot. But I don't really care about what nation is what and stuff, because it all depends on the person doing shit and stuff. Also people are mostly thinking pretty global these days, especially here. So I guess we can assume that especially people on Hacker News don't really waste their energy on such stupid things.

It's basically what I get from the media and stuff. You know.... whatever country you live in. They want to tell you that you are great, should be proud and only talk about other's problems. So usually it's best to watch foreign medias to get a good (or pessimistic) view on your country.

Actually. Sorry, if that sounds plain, but from my perspective the bigger fear is that the US or China are taking over.

Maybe it helps to see Europe more like the states, just still more decentralized. I never really thought about this. In fact this comparison comes from a now US citizen.

Of course Germany and France (as well as UK, but they don't really care too much about the EU anyway) are like two strong US states. There may be so rivalry, but with EU and stuff they have the same goals.

It isn't like people in US think that some state is going to take over, right?

And one doesn't really have to fear much, if it isn't by means of war.

I am not from France, so no idea, how exactly they feel, but you have to keep in mind that the "constitution" of the EU basically grants everyone very equal voting rights. In fact smaller countries would have gotten even more votes if they hadn't killed it off.

There also is no dictator, not even someone in sight. From a democratic point of view Europe's distribution of power is far more even that for example what you see in the US, especially with the recent laws. There is no single person in Europe that has as much privileges as the US president for example.

Lets pretend Germany would really take the lead and stuff making Europe one big Germany this wouldn't really harm anyone.

So that's why people here are more afraid of a state like the US, which invests way more money (and I speak about percentage) into military than every other nation and which also has a lot of power with IWF, world bank (which aren't even really governmental/democratic) and where they have pretty strong nationalism, etc.

Now, nobody really fears the US and stuff. Actually the opposite is partly true. They see how the US struggles with debts, old infrastructure, loosing power to China, etc.

What I want to say with all of this is that things like that are more likely to go on in people's heads.

And I know this sounded kinda bad, but I actually heard the "US is struggling with own problems and soon isn't a world power anymore. That's why they do war and tell others about how to do their economy" quite often lately. Just a few days ago they even showed on the news how all the infrastructure built in sixties makes problems in the US. I guess it was kinda exaggerated, but it sounded like it is a poor country. What I want to say with this is that countries are really, really complex. You can't really say general things about them, cause every time you try to you actually say something that's wrong.

So, maybe there are lots of people fearing Germany and I just don't see them. The only thing I can say is that whenever they show the heads of Germany and France they at least pretend to not have any problems with each other and they do it really well.

Even if that wasn't a clear answer I hope that helped a bit. Basically the only thing that people worry about currently are Greece, Spain and Italy. Maybe it even is too much. They'd be doing well, if there was no worry. They "just" have the problem of everyone worrying, so they don't get any loans, people pull their money from these countries and this creates troubles and it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.

To come back to the topic a bit. It's pretty much what all these rating agencies do. They say: This country may have troubles to pay back their debts, which causes them to have high interests and so it actually becomes true.

That depends on what happens with those dollars. I guess you can best sum it up like this:

Printing money is not inflationary, but spending money can be.

Those 14 trillion USD in government debt is held in bonds precisely because those wealthy enough to own them do not want to spend them. So if, all of a sudden, the Fed prints a lot of dollar bills to pay the US debt, what this really means at an operational level is that they print those dollar bills to buy treasuries on the open market and/or buy directly from the government.

This simply means that the demand for treasuries increases, which drives up the price of treasuries, which is equivalent to driving down the interest rate on treasuries.

To sum it up: if the Fed does what you say, the interest rates will drop further closer to zero, but that's pretty much all that will happen.

Now if you think that decreasing interest rates can have secondary effects, then we can talk about those. But given that the interest rate is almost 0% already anyway, it seems unlikely that a small downward change would have a big economic impact.

Perhaps you're confusing paying back the debt with actual spending. Paying back the debt is simply an asset/liability swap that doesn't change anybody's wealth, and therefore cannot have inflationary effects. Actual spending is something else, and can be inflationary - though in the current economic climate, you could probably increase government spending significantly (by a trillion or so per year) without creating inflationary trouble.

Pyschopaths that twisted wouldn't get very far. It's the same thing with a disease; if it's very lethal and highly contagious, it's not actually very dangerous, because it will kill most carriers before it gets a chance to spread.

So the real problem is that currency has a value all its own, entirely apart from what goods and services it can buy. As a result, there's no way to blindly equate X in one currency with Y in another, because the very act of exchanging one for the other affects their relative values. Transactions that should be purely economic in nature have unavoidable political undertones.

I see.

Wow, that's broken.