Earlier quoted context omitted.
Until you find a more thrustworthy stewart of the international order. Everyone yells loudly about how bad the us is, but then you realize that the whole world voted with there feet that every other alternative is worse. The russians tried for years to write some replacement fiction into reality (BRICS) even though they would be the first to get shanked if the old great game returned. Its a absurd situation where emp…
China is "trustworthy" in the sense that they have obvious, rational, consistent motivations and very stable government.
Netherlands pulls gold out of the US
181–190 of 282 posts
Re: Netherlands pulls gold out of the US
#182Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
How does this not correspond directly to reduced trade deficits? In this scenario the US is either sourcing more of what it needs internally, and thereby importing less, or it is more competitive globally and therefore exporting more, or both.
Re: Netherlands pulls gold out of the US
#183Earlier quoted context omitted.
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).
One of the smart moves the EU has performed is to bring all ideas of Europeanness and European identity and Europe as a continent under its exclusive umbrella. Even places like Switzerland are somehow now defined by their exclusion when you couldn’t get a more European country slap bang in the centre of the continent. Britain has always been an outlier due to being an island hanging off the edge, and is now a pariah…
Ugh, your concept of EU is closer to the USSR or maybe current Russia than to the actual EU. I sincerely hope that such nightmarish concept will never prevail over the relative sanity that we have now.
Re: Netherlands pulls gold out of the US
#184The 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…
Re: Netherlands pulls gold out of the US
#185I'm curious the reason why it was ever held in the US and Canada
Re: Netherlands pulls gold out of the US
#186Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
We can pay for imports with things we make or things we own. To a first approximation, making things employs people and owning things does not. If we pay with things we make, our economy employs people. If we pay with things we own, the jobs disappear while stocks/bonds/real estate soar.
If you want the whole story from an actual economist, read "Trade Wars are Class Wars" by Klein and Pettis.
Re: Netherlands pulls gold out of the US
#187Re: Netherlands pulls gold out of the US
#188Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
> the rest of the world needs dollars to transact Why? Dollars are currently the most convenient. If that changes the world could easily switch to Euros, Yen, Yuan, etc.
Plus if everyone doesn't choose the same it's less convenient.
Re: Netherlands pulls gold out of the US
#189Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's a bizarre headline. New York: 31.33% -> 18.52% Ottawa: 19.72% -> 18.52% My guess is the original title focused just on the U.S., but the editors didn't want to draw attention from the big cheeto, so the headline was changed and now it looks less like the U.S. is the primary target. Honestly, if quick access to their holdings is a concern, I wouldn't hold it against the Dutch if they moved more gold out of Canada…
I mean.. the US has a history concerning gold and duping other countries
Re: Netherlands pulls gold out of the US
#190Earlier quoted context omitted.
> dramatic scenario wouldn’t result in the US compelling the UK to also seize those assets? The US can demand that we seize other people's gold, but if we acceded then it's game over for our financial industry - London is an important financial centre today but if it's actually just New York but on the far side of the Atlantic who cares? My guess is that the UK would say "No" and since that's presumably a demand from…
> Bombing a girl's school in Iran looks like a PR master stroke by comparison. Iran killed more than 30,000 of its own people for peacefully protesting and continues to hang its own citizens to this day. They (along with Hamas, Hezbollah, and more) intentionally set up military assets next to civilian facilities because they know we don’t intentionally strike civilian facilities and they tell you that themselves. Ira…
But that does not mean that launching an assault on Iran at Netanyahu's bidding was a smart move. Especially if it turned out that US arsenals were half empty. This is what you get when no one can tell "no" to the President and survive in their function.
It is not clear to me yet how this entire Iran thing is going to finish. Now the bet seems to be on strangling their economy, which may not even work, but will probably cause some serious suffering of the same people who already suffer under a gallows-happy totalitarian government.