221–230 of 280 posts
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Middle America: good luck eating when we cut off both of your food supplies. Now both of you go stand in a corner until you are ready to work together to take down the government that has us all acting this way.
California alone grows about half of the US's nuts, fruits, and vegetables. Both the West Coast and rest of the country could reconfigure production to serve themselves if desired.
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…
Wouldn’t that necessarily mean that if the US keeps making enemies of allies, then the premium required for these countries to give US money would be higher? Sure, I’ll lend you some, but I don’t trust you that much, you’ll have to pay me more.
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> 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.
So which do you choose? Yuan carries Chinese geopolitical risk, Yen, probably not enough of it in the world plus Japan keeps trying to devalue, Euro maybe, but there's plenty of geopolitical risk there with Russia on the doorstep and shifting politics... Plus if everyone doesn't choose the same it's less convenient.
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> 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.
So which do you choose? Yuan carries Chinese geopolitical risk, Yen, probably not enough of it in the world plus Japan keeps trying to devalue, Euro maybe, but there's plenty of geopolitical risk there with Russia on the doorstep and shifting politics... Plus if everyone doesn't choose the same it's less convenient.
As to shifting politics: The EU is famously extremely hard to move.
The European Council decides the political direction and consists of the heads of state of the member countries; the European Commission is the executive cabinet and needs buy-in from the Council of the European Union and the European Parliament; the Council of the European Union is made up from ministers of the member states and each member state has a veto right on all foreign policy proposed by the European Commission; the European Parliament's members are directly elected through independent elections in the individual member states with proportional representation, and any policy proposed by the European Commission also needs a majority here; the Court of Justice of the European Union's General Court oversees this and is composed of two judges appointed by each member state for a renewable six-year period and reviewed by an independent committee.
In other words: nothing gets done fast, and nothing gets done without buy-in from a lot of people with very opposed political goals. Quite different from a country like, say, the United States, where the loser of the popular vote routinely becomes president, is handed God-Emperor levels of power, and is virtually impossible to unseat - leaving the foreign policies of a nuclear superpower to be decided by how a single person felt when he stepped out of his bed this morning.
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> requires a lot of security and is a risk and has a cost
I’m not sure 100% sure, but I imagine the cost of transporting to Europe is probably higher than the cost of refining to the European standard.
https://vinodvsharma.com/top-15-biggest-gold-refineries-in-t...
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The US government value of gold is hard pegged to $42/oz since 1973. Off by a factor of about 100 from market prices.
What is the value of this? Clearly the US won't sell me gold for $42/oz or the arbitragers would own the country, and nobody will sell the US gold for that amount ... so what does the $42/oz "peg" actually mean?
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Also tons and tons of coal. Hopefully just a stopgap.
Yeah, until they run out of coal.
"China, the world’s largest coal consumer, has domestic reserves of coal to last the next 50 years, according to annual reserves data from the Ministry of Natural Resources cited by Bloomberg.
At current rates of domestic production, China also has crude oil reserves that could last for at least 18 more years, according to the ministry"
https://oilprice.com/Latest-Energy-News/World-News/China-Say...
https://www.mining.com/web/china-has-enough-coal-reserves-to...
I am dutch and read the news this week but I found it weird that a part of it went to England. I was expecting a European country.
Their goal isn't only safe storage, it's also being able to sell when needed. You can't quickly trade with the gold that's in their own safe storage facility in Zeist, because you would need to physically transport it. The reserve at the Bank of England is put there because there is a large market for gold trading there. So you can use the gold immediately to influence the markets. Putting it in a safe place in anoth…
More specifically: very few people besides the NL government have any gold stored inside that facility, so intra-facility trade is basically nonexistent.
I am dutch and read the news this week but I found it weird that a part of it went to England. I was expecting a European country.
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).
"The Soviet Union" wasn't really a name either, as "soviet" just means a governing council. But since it's a foreign word it sounds like a name.
It's interesting that some of the historically most powerful entities don't have proper names.
As for England being European, is it really? Traditionally people don't always count the Nordic countries as Europe, and I'd assume the same would be true of England? Culturally it is of course, just as much as France or Germany.
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My understanding is that it’s on shelves in a shared vault and you relabel who owns that shelf/slot/bin.
I wonder if anyone checks the gold. You could end up with the problem Amazon had, where people were inserting fake items into the supply chain and then it was just getting mixed into the real products and nobody could tell who was doing the fraud. Because instead of treating each item as an individual thing, they were pooling everything with other items of the same type. So if I send in a brick and say it’s an iPhone…
I've no idea what checks are done to exclude such artifacts from gold storage. If somebody accepted them and stacked them in a reserve vault, they might go decades without discovery.
I guess it's not something to worry about. It's improbable, and even so, if everybody agrees on the value of undetected bogus W/Au ingots, makes no difference from the real thing.