That spark could end up being the rollout of chinas digital currency to the world and requiring payment using that currency when dealing with foreign businesses. This will kill the position of the US dollar as a reserve currency, slowly, but almost certainly.
Surely the crash of the US economy has to be soon
651–660 of 697 posts
Re: Surely the crash of the US economy has to be soon
#652Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Abstractions like rule of law, democracy, government currencies and stock exchanges are intangible and imaginary. They're mostly just figments of collective belief. > But when we devolve from the rules-based order to the old order of pure power and might-makes-right, kings and dictators, when there's no more collective belief that the rules apply to the rich and powerful, then the tower of abstractions collapses, a…
Religion isn’t based on “the greater good”, it’s always explicitly about the will of the god or gods involved and obeying or appeasing them.
About religion, I don't think we can say "always" or anything near to that.
I agree that religions commonly use the god/god's will as the reason, but I don't think we should take that at face value. It's the argument to trump all others - rulers often claim to be chosen by the will of the supernatural - but not the reason the rule was made, which is a product of the cultures involved.
And humans often come to the same ethical conclusions: The rules against murder and rape, the priority on justice and fairness, as examples, are universal across cultures regardless of religion (look up 'cultural univerals').
Re: Surely the crash of the US economy has to be soon
#653I feel like there's some credibility to 'this time it's different' The US economy depends on the country's position of world hegemon - the US dollar is the world's main reserve currency, the US enforces international order and trade rules via its military strength, it dominates technology and culture through 'US defaultism'. I dont think AI even factors in to this. The US economy is priced for global reach - if it ma…
You need US dollars because you have with US. Tarrifs hurt the need for dollars.
Re: Surely the crash of the US economy has to be soon
#654Earlier quoted context omitted.
Personally I'm less and less inclined to believe in capitalism and money as a concept - we've long past moved the concept of money as universal barter, and into strange and speculative theories about how things ought to be valued, with the most valuable things either emerging from immediately unclear value propositions (impossibly valued companies, high-paid jobs that seemingly dont contribute to society) or artifici…
Much of the difference in the BYD cost is accounted for by a 27% tariff on the cars, transport and increased costs for warranty and compliance certification costs, as well as likely subsidies in the domestic market. Of those, you’ll see that only transport costs are a function of “capitalism” the rest is government.
The UK doesn’t apply tariffs on Chinese cars yet the situation is similar here.
Re: Surely the crash of the US economy has to be soon
#655> It feels as though all we need is a spark. And yet, many sparks seem to have come and gone. Big market moves, in stocks or yields, that have recovered Yes, in a five year span we've had three 20% drawdowns in the stock market that have all recovered which is unprecedented. IMO, anyone who thinks we're going to crash and have a lost decade is not looking at the bigger picture. The Federal Reserve exists to allow the…
You're missing one important feedback loop in this system: That debt is subsidized by foreign institutions, which have been slowly pulling out as they recognize that the US has been consistently consuming beyond their means. Also almost every continent has been working on circumventing the USD as the primary exchange currency in some way or another.
This is reflected in the USD losing value at a higher pace, which means the debt cycle becomes unsustainable.
Hopefully it will gradually managed, but that requires a large amount of political will, tax hikes and budget cuts. Very hard to do fairly and different people have extremely conflicting views on who should get poorer, because that's exactly what cuts and hikes mean.
The current admin is trying to brute force a change, where they keep their cake and eat it too, but they are eroding international trust which just accelerates the issue.
Re: Surely the crash of the US economy has to be soon
#656Earlier quoted context omitted.
I was referring more to the millions of Uyghurs in political prisons and their overreaching surveillance of the population. And I was just speaking of what I think about China, not saying the current US administration is any better. I don't think it will be there forever though.
Right the Uyghurs, a word we never knew before. When faced with credible threat of islamic terror in their country China implemented some harsh, systemic ideas about what to do with it. I'm sure if they just started two wars in the middle east instead the western community would be way more lenient towards them. China did what it though was the correct thing and the west happily classified it as racism and religious…
Your comments are all about "the US is bad too" which I consider whataboutism. I am not from the US nor live there and I was opposed to all the wars in the middle east and to palantir and the Snowden revelations etc.
But that doesn't make what China does better in any way. And those millions of Uyghurs they locked up couldn't possibly all be terrorists. That makes it racism and religious persecution.
Ps how is Cuba a vassal state of the US? When you speak of a concentration camp I assume you refer to Guantanamo?
Re: Surely the crash of the US economy has to be soon
#657Earlier quoted context omitted.
Even the evil adjective starts to look debatable in contrast to what current hegemony is doing on its way down. Apparently their worst offence so far was calmly outgrowing and out competing their peers while benefiting global consumers with he fruits of organized labor of their own society.
I'm particularly annoyed that the US is for the people of Iran and not, like China, for the government of Iran. And the US putting secondary sanctions on Russian oil to starve Putin from Chinese and Indian oil revenues? Disgusting.
The US is for the oil of Iran, not its people. Just like it doesn't actually care about the people of Venezuela, just its oil.
Re: Surely the crash of the US economy has to be soon
#658Earlier quoted context omitted.
They can and they do; that's called dollarization. It's worth observing that dollars that are never supposed to return to the US don't have the same anti-counterfeiting pressure that dollars spent in the US do. I don't know how much of a market there is in counterfeiting USD for dollarized economies.
This sounds hard to believe. Adding anti-counterfeit messures to the bills that have them ($10s and up?) can't be that expensive compared to the value of the note, why would they make two different versions? Not to mention, that would break fungibility. Can you provide a source?
> Can you provide a source?
A source... for what claim? What do you think I'm saying?
Re: Surely the crash of the US economy has to be soon
#659Earlier quoted context omitted.
Neither is 'real'. The power of might depends on belief just as much as the power of rules. You need a whole lot of compliance, even when forced by fear and terror, to just keep up a police state. The belief consists of where people think other people assign authority to, at large. But that can be just as brittle as a meme stock if the time is right. Social reality is always constructed. No single construction is mor…
A system that is closer to physical, tangible reality is more "real" than one built on many layers of concepts, beliefs and ideas. Just as "real assets" like buildings, machinery and metals are more "real" than abstract assets. Abstract assets like shares of a corporation, intellectual property, cash in a bank account, promises to deliver a commodity in the future, and other intangible concepts only exist because we…
"rules-based order to might-makes-right"
These are the same. They are the same because someone has to enforce the rules. The reason why this entire discussion is so obtuse is because you refuse to accept this. If I was wrong and they were different, you wouldn't treat the US and others (say China) by the different moral standards. To bring this back to an individual level, this is the same as saying police don't deter crime. You wish these two concepts were different so you let your political bias blind you to reality. That doesn't effect reality though. Police do deter crime and whoever (the US) enforces the rules based order has to do so (from time to time) kinetically.
Re: Surely the crash of the US economy has to be soon
#660Earlier quoted context omitted.
International law was and is also a fiction. We have various conventions and agreements. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_law "In the 1940s through the 1970s, the dissolution of the Soviet bloc and decolonisation across the world resulted in the establishment of scores of newly independent states.[67] As these former colonies became their own states, they adopted European views of international law.[68] A…
Laws aren't fictitious just because people/countries break them. No one writes a law thinking "that settles that, no more embezzling." Laws simply tell you how that system works: you embezzle, FBI arrests you, you get tried, etc. Also the US always made a big deal about not joining various treaties, with their reasoning explicitly being "we actually plan to do a lot of things that would violate that treaty." In that…
Ofcourse people break laws. But they are enforceable and the authorities have absolute power to enforce them. Putin can get away doing whatever the f he wants but nobody in Canada can get away with breaking any law they want whenever they feel like it, for example. That's the difference between the very real Canadian laws over Canadians and "international law" over nobody. Now Canada can pass a law that is in line with some international agreement, but it's still the law of Canada. Other laws don't apply in Canada. Canadian laws don't apply in other countries. And that's about it. If we had world elections, world government, world police, world courts and world laws, with all countries giving up their sovereignty to those institutions then we'd have "international law". Until then we don't.