The Fraying of the US Global Currency Reserve System | Hacker News Reader

The Fraying of the US Global Currency Reserve System

lynalden.com

113 pointsgraderjs17 comments

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25407583

dupe 14 days ago 360 comments

This is a deeper read on the same subject by Ray Dalio https://www.principles.com/the-changing-world-order/

The assertion that economies were based on trade isn't well-founded. Multiple researchers have found that economies were based on credit rather than trade - trading goods for the future expectation of a trade rather than an immediate barter.

https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2016/02/barter-...

I think for sake of argument, trade here is all encompassing. Trade on future, trade on credit, on loan, IOU, or cash... it’s still a trade. A barter between one entity and another for perceived value.

That is not at all what your link nor the studies it references says

it talks about a Community based "gift" economies that are not scalable and work only with limited numbers of close knit people in a single cultural homogenized community

That site looks like a collection of copy-pasted standard "investment wisdom" articles. The word "petrodollar" used in this particular article strongly suggests a propaganda operation, similar to RT or ZeroHedge.

On the contrary, I found this to be anything but a robo-investment column, and this article was the first time I’d seen a rational explanation of the origin and history of the term “petrodollar”, whereas I had only seen it used as a pejorative in the past.

These discussions are incomplete without more context of the real resource distribution and global security implications.

Money needs to be a core part of a global distributed information system that incorporates data about resources. Talk about carbon taxes is hinting at this in a very basic and limited way. But for starters, information about what money is used for should be integrated with transactions.

And actually money distribution largely embodies power distribution. This should also be explicitly tracked and integrated into the information system in regards to things like real ability to move resources or military assets etc.

You just are not going to get real security or any degree of equality between nation states or sustainability without resolving the core cultural, political, and technical problems. But at least an emphasis on high technology gives a hint of hope of starting to address these things in a sane manner.

It’s a re-post but it was a great read and took me so long to finish that I lost the original thread anyway...

If you’re reading it for the investment takeaway (obligatory disclaimer that this isn’t investment advice), the bottom line is:

> My base case is that going forward over the next several years, the global economy will, more likely than not, encounter the third dollar bear cycle of this current petrodollar system. If so, assets such as global equities, quality residential real estate, precious metals, industrial commodities, and alternatives such as Bitcoin, are likely to do well.

The bitcoin permabears on HN have been hibernating lately, only emerging to give downvotes. It’s quite clear that hard money has a purpose even if you dither on how extensively to use it. Bitcoin is simply the absolute hardest money ever invented that has become globally used, and it’s digital-native. And its marketcap is still so tiny!

I wonder if this is the reason for the recent bitcoin surge?

I'm not sure why you're being downvoted; it might not be the reason but I feel like it's a reason based on personal experience.

I've been both a BTC skeptic and advocate in the past; I was recently brought back from skepticism by the massive US stimulus and the "if we can pay for corporate bailouts, we can pay off all student debt" line of thinking. I'm not even against those policies, but I'd prefer to have my currency not denominated in USD.

Total student debt is only ~5% of US GDP. We could undo the last tax cut and it would be paid for in a year.

US taxes are at a historic low. There's plenty of money even to make school completely free. The idea that paying for student loans would affect the economy at all is nuts to me. Not even counting the corona bailouts we could have paid for it by just not lowering corporate taxes the last few years.

Student loans disproportionately affect the poor and middle class, to the benefit of the rich. The main reason that school has become more expensive and led to all these loans is huge cuts in state funding to colleges. For our parents most states paid over 70% of their tuition. That percentage is far lower now.

Basically I'm saying the money to pay for school used to be there, but it was taken away and now we have a whole generation in student loan debt. We almost owe it to those people to "make things right" and pay for their school just like we did for previous generations

Unlimited quantitative easing and low interest rates is why everything is going up this year; housing, stocks, bitcoin.

Both Square and PayPal are now offering BTC in their ecosystems. They're both buying up massive amounts. Why are people using SQ and PYPL to buy BTC? Probably ease-of-use and if you leave your money in USD you'll be hit negatively by the current money printing (quantitative easing).

I read this back when it was posted a few days ago and it was very good. The heart of it is that the global reserve currency needs to run persistent trade deficits in order to put itself out into the world. This isn’t really sustainable. The dollar will weaken making the US more competitive on exports.

I think this combined with the decade or more of low interest rates will create a really prosperous time for the US. That is assuming we can take advantage of it and don’t instead try to drag out the petrodollar system.

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