I can totally get down for this interpretation. When you think of Humanity (collectively-singular) as an entity destined to invent everything, we will obviously eventually invent the concepts of money, interest, debt, etc. The money can reproduce faster than Humanity can, so we're effectively in debt to ourself and have spent so many years trying to pay it off that we've forgotten we're truly One.
And that is not what Graber is talking about. The point was about US Treasuries. Everyone treats them as cash equivalents because nobody believes that the US Government will default. But Graber says and I quote:
> American imperial power is based on a debt that will never-can never-be repaid. Its national debt has become a promise, not just to its own people, but to the nations of the entire world, that everyone knows will not be kept.
And this is the kind of nonsense that is sprinkled all over the book.
If you incur debts to your body, you'll pay for them in the future.
If we squander intergenerational assets, our children will pay.
October: +100, finally paid back the 100 taken in March.
Anothet option: you have multiple personalities.
Btw. Semi joking
so what? Have they missed an interest payment? Is their economy unproductive and cannot pay the interest?
Having the debt means you are entitled to a portion of the economic output of the machine behind that debt. Why is it a must for the debt to be repayable in one go? Esp. if the debt was not all issued in one go?
each time a particular treasury bond is due in full, the US treasury has been able to repay it. Whether they repay it by issuing new bonds, or increase their taxes and pay it off, makes no difference to the holder of that bond.
I guess this comes down to semantics. Paying off an old loan with a new one isn‘t ”paying off your debt“ in my eyes. You are still in debt afterwards.
The total amount of debt will never come down again without hyperinflation. Whether that is good, bad, or doesn‘t matter is up to economists. But that‘s how it is.
In the context of meeting obligations to creditors, which is what is being discussed, it absolutely is.
> The total amount of debt will never come down again without hyperinflation.
What has fundamentally changed since the last time it did which was (checks) Q2 2019?
> Whether that is good, bad, or doesn‘t matter is up to economists. But that‘s how it is.
There is very little reason to believe that. In fact, to the extent that the debt and inflation are related, the same acts which drive the debt up drive inflation, not the other way around.
Graber's point is primarily about foreign holders of US debt and how this is the American empire extracting tribute from its vassals. Whether America is debt-free or not really relevant.
Ironically, the people that are most opposed to MMT on the basis of outright lies about its content are the people that are most likely to argue against large deficits on inflation grounds even when there is no problem borrowing enough money to fuel it.
At the level of the world's biggest economies, the concepts of debt (bonds), money, and interest rates are more abstract economic levers that central banks pull in order to keep economies chugging. They're not really the same things they are to individual people and corporations, e.g. in the way debt can cripple someone's finances.
The central banks and governments are the game masters who set the rules and issue tokens, and we're the players interacting within the game and responding to the environments that they create.
To restate: bonds and other loans are literally a policy tool to take in USD from or inject USD into circulation, in order to intentionally change the size of the money supply: "Open market operations (OMO) refers to a central bank buying or selling short-term Treasuries and other securities in the open market in order to influence the money supply." It's not like the central bank actually needs to borrow USD from the money supply; it's literally the issuer of USD and could create more at any time (or take it in and destroy it).
Why can the US do this? Because its bonds are denominated in its own currency, which world investors use. The demand for USD-denominated debt is a major benefit of the USD being the world's main reserve currency.
And if I Google "united states per capita debt", I see a box:
According to the last data point published, United States per capita debt in 2020 was 84,850 dollars per inhabitant. In 2019 it was 70,557 dollars, afterwards rising by 14,293 dollars, and if we again check 2010 we can see that then the debt per person was 46,284 dollars.
The US already defaulted on their gold promises.
Right. So this supposed "revelation" that fiat money is debt created by elites out of thin air, has been the hocus-pocus story that every goldbug, sovereign citizen's movement and crypto-coin huckster has memorized to absolutely wow the gullible with conspiracy theories for the last 100 years. It's a guaranteed way to make a (fiat) buck if you sell a book along these lines.
But the ridiculous thing is, in every situation other than US dollars, all people understand that buying debt is gambling on the risk of not being paid back. Whether you're buying some Argentine note that pays 30% or a municipal bond (or a war bond) or a ticket to see a movie in a theater that might close next week, you understand that the paper is worth more at maturity but it comes with risk. Everyone outside America who actually buys US debt fully understands this and makes the risk calculation, so how is it that average slackjawed Americans are just dumbstruck, generation after generation, year after year, by the notion that their evil government or central banks together are pulling off some sort of fast one on the rest of the world? No one buys this shit who doesn't weigh the risk. To whatever extent it's a house of cards, that's on the investors anyway, so there's no reason the average American should trouble themselves about it until/unless they need to learn what a national default looks like.