171–180 of 282 posts
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Or until you don't need to buy oil at all. China has reduced its consumption by 1.5M barrels/day this year alone.
To nitpick, much of that is probably due to halting refining for export and drawing down reserves. But of course the point stands that they are rapidly electrifying and expanding renewable generation.
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England is definitely a European country. I'm tired of people constantly making this political abuse of language of conflating "the EU" with "Europe". (And yes, saying "America" for "US of A" annoys me too. First step towards losing an imperialist state of mind is letting people from Canada and Brazil be in America).
Most Americans refer to their country as 'the U.S.'. The people I most hear referring to it as 'America' are Brits.
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England is definitely a European country. I'm tired of people constantly making this political abuse of language of conflating "the EU" with "Europe". (And yes, saying "America" for "US of A" annoys me too. First step towards losing an imperialist state of mind is letting people from Canada and Brazil be in America).
In all fairness, I deal with British tourists a lot and they always talk about "going to Europe" when they refer to their summer holiday in Benidorm.
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Go further with your reasoning... Why would anyone lend the US more...
I am not defending the US government but the reason why you hold treasuries is because if you want to buy something in two years, or ten years, etc. there is a good chance you will want to buy something with dollars. Oil, soy beans, New York real estate..
A standard 24,000-TEU cargo ship could hold every ounce of humanity's gold using under 1.5% of its physical volume.
So the Dutch portion is a rounding error of global gold that fits in a single shipping container.
The funny thing is that with $40T of public dept US is basically taking money from other countries (in exchange for a pice of paper saying IOU) and then using that money to force these countries to do what’s in US best interests (real or perceived). And the bigger that pile of debt is the more every government is invested in us not going bankrupt, hence the leverage just gets stronger. US is basically a private equit…
What you point out here is a major weakness in the typical US citizen's understanding of where US wealth and power comes from. The US prints two kinds of dollars, the regular kind, then the T-bills. T-bills get exchanged like dollars, investors/governments buy them because they are thought to be as stable as dollars, but also bear a bit of yield. The US benefits by printing T-bills over dollars because merely by chan…
Why? Dollars are currently the most convenient. If that changes the world could easily switch to Euros, Yen, Yuan, etc.
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What you point out here is a major weakness in the typical US citizen's understanding of where US wealth and power comes from. The US prints two kinds of dollars, the regular kind, then the T-bills. T-bills get exchanged like dollars, investors/governments buy them because they are thought to be as stable as dollars, but also bear a bit of yield. The US benefits by printing T-bills over dollars because merely by chan…
>deflation is the only thing worse than inflation. In any empirical sense this is absolutely false. The only instance of a significant negative instance of deflation was its contribution to the Great Depression in the early nineteen hundreds, and the effect of that was minor compared to the effects of extreme inflation (hyperinflation) that occurred in places like Weimar Germany and Zimbabwe. Deflation is inherently…
Oh boy, do I have news for you. It is in fact possible to run out of money, and in a deflating economy with no jobs you can't just go out and earn more. It puts peoples' collective backs against the wall -- at which point they decide to fight like cornered animals rather than die in a corner, and things get nasty.
Inflation crises are awful, but when you run out of money there are jobs and you can get more and this generally prevents them from turning into bloodbaths. This is why we collectively decided to err in this direction.
Weimar Germany is the perfect example. Did it suck? Yeah. Savings were incinerated, everyday activities became market speculation, the memes are all true -- but it happened under nearly full employment and once the root causes were addressed everything largely simmered down. This is in stark contrast to the deflationary shock of the Great Depression later that decade which propelled the Nazis into power and led directly to WWII.
99% deflation doesn't happen because people start killing each other long before then.
Just a reminder: The Netherlands' 612 tonnes represent 0.28% of all gold ever mined and 1.7% of central bank reserves. Because gold is insanely dense (19.32 g/cm³), all the gold mined in human history fits into about ~340 shipping containers A standard 24,000-TEU cargo ship could hold every ounce of humanity's gold using under 1.5% of its physical volume. So the Dutch portion is a rounding error of global gold that f…
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It is explained in the Alden piece, section "The Fraying of the Petrodollar System", subsection "The Triffin Dilemma Unfolds". What I meant was "blue collar working class" as opposed to the neo-artistocrat professional class. The Triffin Dilemma is a contributor to the K shaped economy and rise of populism. >And from there, the value of the system depends on who you ask. Folks who are often on the higher end of the i…
I guess I'm not seeing anything tying the trade deficit to the destruction of unions, to the massive reduction in top tax rates resulting in higher CEO compensation, etc. The piece puts increasing trade deficits next to lots of stuff about increasing inequality, but it does not make the case that trade deficits are the cause of increasing inequality. There's a person that had a job making physical things, but they ar…