The four times the United States government defaulted on its debt (2021) • Hacker News Board

Re: The four times the United States government defaulted on its debt (2021)

#91

Post by jjoonathan » Wed, May 10, 2023, 11:25 PM UTC

thomastjeffery wrote: post #90

jjoonathan wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If so, you need to get your tap water checked. Something is leaching in. You need one of those little testing kits that turns red when it detects conservative talking points. In any case, the Democrats have a few large, obvious subgroups: the Justice Dems, the Economic Left, and "MSNBC Liberals." Let's call them the AOC, Bernie, and Biden factions. Sure, they bicker between elections and fight during primaries but th…

> In any case, the Democrats have a few large, obvious subgroups The elected Democrats, yes. What about Democrat voters ? > The Republicans have big divisions too. Trump and DeSantis have very different visions for the party. Absolutely, but that doesn't stop the average Republican/conservative voter from supporting either candidate at the end of the day. > I've seen this movie too many times to put much stock in lef…

Democratic voters come together on election day too -- otherwise our coalition wouldn't have beaten your coalition in 2018 and 2020. It must be awkward to lose to a coalition that you don't believe exists, lol.

Pundits always say "THE (OPPOSITE PARTY) ARE FALLING APART!!!!" because everyone wants to believe it. Your pundits say it and our pundits say it. There's an important meta-lesson to extract from this: if you lob this meme across party lines, it will land like a whoopie-cushion because your opponent is guaranteed to be even more familiar with its inverse.

Re: The four times the United States government defaulted on its debt (2021)

#92

Post by somenameforme » Thu, May 11, 2023, 5:13 AM UTC

georgeecollins wrote: post #85

somenameforme wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They literally were defaults. The reason for Bretton Woods, and the reason the USD became the overwhelming world reserve currency, is that it was directly convertible to gold. Buying USD was as good as buying gold, which meant the currency was not dependent on any given country. But then due to poor economic policy we found ourselves in a situation where we had far more issued debt (currency) than we had gold. We wer…

You say we left Bretton Wood due to "poor economic policy". If that were true the economy of the US has performed poorly since 1972. That's crazy. Worse, it implies that we should go back to the gold standard. That's also tin foil hat proposition. A default is by definition when you break a contract. On July 1944, the US signed the Bretton Woods Agreement. Agreements between countries change, they aren't contracts. T…

I'm not going to debate semantics, but I will hit on the other issue. This is a site you may find interesting: https://wtfhappenedin1971.com/

The reason we were forced to default (or whatever you want to call it) on our obligations under Bretton Woods is that our economic policies were enabling inflation to start spiraling out of control. Cumulative inflation from 1913 to 1970 increased 306%. That was a major problem. From 1913 to today? It's 3091%. This causes countless problems in society. Take wealth inequality for instance. Workers have always expected annual raises, even in times of negligible inflation, but in inflationary times those those raises often struggle to even keep up with inflation. This [1] is a graph of real wage for workers. It understates the picture as it starts in 1979, at which point the decline was already in full swing.

But even there, you see but a 10% real increase in wages over the past 40 years. By contrast, real GDP/capita [2] has increased by more than 100%. And not only are there are far more basic costs to life today than in 1979 (internet, electronic devices, etc) but many things like housing and education costs have accelerated dramatically far ahead of nominal inflation. So you have a world with more billionaires than ever, and one where more people than ever can't afford to even feed themselves without government assistance. And this is not even scratching the surface of the issues. Basically we had a small problem in 1971. Instead of solving it, we stuck a bandage on it - leaving a later generation to solve a dramatically larger problem.

[1] - https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LES1252881600Q

[2] - https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/A939RX0Q048SBEA

Re: The four times the United States government defaulted on its debt (2021)

#93

Post by roenxi » Thu, May 11, 2023, 10:29 AM UTC

sdfghswe wrote: post #86

stareatgoats wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well actually, the collective reaction of the west, including the virtual exclusion of Russia from all western economic activity could not have come as a surprise to Putin. This is in fact the only sense I can make of the overt aggression towards Ukraine: Putin and his clique already held the short end of the stick after Maidan, Georgia, Syria etc: i.e. the west were not going to make life easy for him anyway, so the…

I don't disagree with you. But consider this. The way you're putting is "Russia did X therefore they knew (meaning predicted/guessed) that Y was gonna happen". I don't disagree. However, the other person said "Russia saw it coming, it was doing X before Y". This inverts the causality because it suggests that Y was gonna happen regardless, and as a consequence they started X ahead of time. Russia wants to be a superpo…

I don't think the relation is all that strong. The US wasn't especially sanctioned after Iraq for example. As far as I know no US assets were frozen and seized. Although, to be fair, maybe people were sanctioning them and nobody noticed because the US is pretty robust. Stealing stuff isn't a usual global response to unjust wars.

The US was looking for a good excuse, and it got one. But I doubt there was a rule on the book saying that they were going to wipe their owings to Russia if the Ukraine was invaded. It isn't like Ukraine is in NATO or has some sort of defensive treaty with the US, all the activity is their initiative because they want to give Russia a black eye/topple Putin.

Re: The four times the United States government defaulted on its debt (2021)

#94

Post by GordonAShumway » Fri, May 12, 2023, 5:23 AM UTC

curiousllama wrote: post #7

The US Government has never defaulted on its debt under the current (~50 year old) global financial system. It HAS defaulted when transitioning off the gold/silver standard, when the world moved off Breton Woods, and during the Civil War. I’d note that each of those defaults were related to the total collapse of the existing rules for national/global finance. So ultimately, these defaults do bolster the case for the…

Well, given the extensive use of US Treasuries as collateral, a globe spanning margin call would probably create a collapse of the system.

Re: The four times the United States government defaulted on its debt (2021)

#95

Post by thomastjeffery » Fri, May 12, 2023, 11:47 PM UTC

jjoonathan wrote: post #91

thomastjeffery wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> In any case, the Democrats have a few large, obvious subgroups The elected Democrats, yes. What about Democrat voters ? > The Republicans have big divisions too. Trump and DeSantis have very different visions for the party. Absolutely, but that doesn't stop the average Republican/conservative voter from supporting either candidate at the end of the day. > I've seen this movie too many times to put much stock in lef…

Democrat ic voters come together on election day too -- otherwise our coalition wouldn't have beaten your coalition in 2018 and 2020. It must be awkward to lose to a coalition that you don't believe exists, lol. Pundits always say "THE (OPPOSITE PARTY) ARE FALLING APART!!!!" because everyone wants to believe it. Your pundits say it and our pundits say it. There's an important meta-lesson to extract from this: if you…

So why are you lobbing it at me?

Democrat voters voted for the winner of their tent. It took coordination and convincing: most of which happened after Bernie dropped out of the race.

My entire point is that we are all stuck in a two-party system; and politically that is advantageous to conservatives and moderates, and disadvantageous to progressives.