401–410 of 913 posts
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everyone complains, nobody has alternatives. what would have been the correct actions in that situation? really the government should tax in good times. and spend in bad times. and be a counter weight to private sector
no they literally just kept printing money for no reason
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You are right. My point is that if you have international trade of even mild complexity, having a currency is very convenient so trade will end up being denominated in one. No reason it can't be some crypto that is not backed by any nation.
> No reason it can't be some crypto that is not backed by any nation There is a great reason: a state-backed currency should always be accepted by that state. If the world is in crisis, you may wind up stuck with your Bitcoins.
I agree that you need the currency to be accepted by the state for good local trade support. But that was not the point.
The international value of the dollar as a reserve and trade currency is inherently tied to the behavior of the US Government and the Federal Reserve. The behavior of the US Government has been very unusual lately, and the independence of the Federal Reserve is actively being challenged. So draw from that whatever conclusions you wish.
Currencies fundamentally relate to some trust. I believe that the near-term de-dollarization isn't as much trust erosion as it is a tool to provide monetary penalty for behaving in unpredictable ways. However it will provide incentive to move away from the dollar in the long-term, ie as Fareed Zakaria says "recent actions are accelerating the world to the multipolar future".
Sure, everyone else is also acting based on childish emotions now, not just the US president. It's not about retaliation at all, it's about reducing suddenly very imminent risks.
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People downvote this but Bitcoin has some very nice properties: - easy to verify/impossible to forge (as opposed to gold and paper currency) - fixed supply (as opposed to paper currency, oil, and even gold) - easy to transfer from one party to another (as opposed to gold, oil, and physical cash)
It’s dumb because it requires uninterrupted access to an incredibly complex system. The cognitive dissonance of people who see bitcoin as resilient is hilarious.
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You are right. My point is that if you have international trade of even mild complexity, having a currency is very convenient so trade will end up being denominated in one. No reason it can't be some crypto that is not backed by any nation.
> No reason it can't be some crypto that is not backed by any nation There is a great reason: a state-backed currency should always be accepted by that state. If the world is in crisis, you may wind up stuck with your Bitcoins.
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This is part of the same reason many people don't use Bitcoin- you can't actually do much with it because retailers don't accept it. But China is definitely thinking about how to fix that problem, and soon they will make it possible to pay directly in CNY in other countries. Once you can buy things with it, the CNY is attractive from a practical perspective. A lot of your stuff is already manufactured in China, once/…
Paying Chinese companies in RMB isn’t the issue. If I sell something and a Chinese company pays me in RMB, I can’t really do anything with a billion yuan. Can’t buy a company (limitations on foreign ownership), can’t buy property (99-year lease that can be canceled on the whims of the government at any time), can’t buy Chinese debt (terrible yields, very small foreign market access, incredibly opaque laws and account…
Also, it's not like a 99-year lease has no value. That's your entire lifetime+.
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> US century is already over Maybe, maybe not. We're currently the Soviet Union in the 1970s. Gerontocratic. Sclerotic. Hyped up on a new mythology. And economically uncompetitive on several levels, with the future (then computers, now elecrification) sweeping past us to our applause. Unlike the Soviets, however, we can see it happening and debate it. If '26 and '28 change course, the damage will still be done. But t…
I'd agree with most of what you said, but there is no "raising a Gestapo". ICE has existed for 25 years. And the laws that give it permission to act haven't changed. It has gradually grown over the decades but what it fundamentally does has not. What's new is finally the federal government pushing back against locales that refuse to allow local police to cooperate with federal law enforcement by means of massive infl…
Minnesota would like to have a chat with you.
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It’s not just that This is a gradual decline. From 70% in the 90s to 60% today. Today there are more options like the Euro that didn’t exist in the 90s. People can argue over EU economic stability, but it’s there as reasonable option.
As time goes on, fewer people are alive that predate the EU and more people will perceive it as a lasting institution. Additionally, we've now seen the EU survive the departure of a major economic power (the UK). More people are certainly willing to believe in the stability of the EU now. Another major currency is the Yuan, and some countries may be as willing to trade in Yuan to improve relations with China, so perh…
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Nobody is cheering for inflation to get worse, they are celebrating it being held down to 2.7% after higher inflation a few years ago. The U.S. is a net exporter of oil and food and self-sufficent for majority of its mineral needs as well. There is no need for U.S. to crash its currency to incentivize domestic production, it can just impose tariffs on imports to do so.
The problem with tariffs is really just trumps complete instability. Why would anyone invest in domestic manufactoring when Trump wildly flip flops on all tariff policy using it as a diplomatic punishment and reward system? Especially when his tariffs in general are legally questionable at best and the other half of us politics are against them just in principal. Imagine investing millions in a domestic factory and t…
So it's not just that the policies are (A) counterproductive and foolish and (B) changed on a whim and (C) have no long-term foundation and (D) are changed for corrupt reasons... but even after all that, (E) the corrupt person "making deals" is incapable of honoring them.
China is intentionally undermining the dollar in order to try to make the Yuan the world currency[1,2,3]. My current hypothesis is that the growth in the _price_ of the US Stock market (eg S&P 500) is actually devaluation of the dollar. Compared to real money (Gold) the S&P500 is down over the past 10 years. [4] 1 - https://www.reddit.com/r/economy/comments/1o2s6qp/yuan_has_s... 2 - https://www.economist.com/china/20…
I don’t think that’s feasible because China’s capital markets aren’t secure for foreign investors and never will be unless China changes the very thing that they want to be. They’d have to open their markets, be open to direct foreign investment, no more China-only ownership of companies, and no more artificial devaluation of the Yuan. Also the US capital market is huge. Surprisingly huge, even, and there is very lit…