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Comment by adam_arthur | Hacker News Reader

They can't really do that because Firm A may depend on Firm B's payment to stay afloat. So you can't just say Firm B doesn't have to pay A and all is well. Also if a Firm defaults on its debt obligations, nobody will choose to lend to that Firm in the future.

Certainly it still may be possible to untangle the situation by shifting losses to those who can bear it (socialize them), but it's not as simple as you make it sound. Have to work out a whole graph of dependencies.

Lehman Brothers had something like $50T of value in underwater derivatives. Good luck solving that

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Many problems aside, they could just print or give money.

Yeah, check with South America on how that works out. It can be done to a certain extent, but obviously these aren't cost free solutions.

South Am governments are dependent on banks in other parts of the world.

The Chinese government is not.

There's just some realities about global economics. Uruguay, Portugal, or Rwanda default, then they have a problem. China or US has the same issues, and it's just not the same kind of problem. They would just redefine things so that they don't default and then call the whole thing a "bailout". I'm not ragging on south americans or africans or portuguese, I'm just stating facts. It's not fair, but that's how the global system works.

You do business with China or the US, you find out fairly early on that even in a crisis, it's their way or the highway.

You don't seem to understand that it's not that simple. If the trail of dependencies in the system is deep and highly leveraged, it doesn't matter if the government "wills" it to be one way or the other.

Economies and companies are highly interconnected. There is no magic wand to fix the problem without serious repercussions, even with an authoritarian government.

You wipe out USD debt holders, they will never lend to your companies again. You print money to pay off debts, you get inflation, weaker currency and potentially other destabilizing outcomes, like moral hazard of private sector expecting bailouts.

All debt problems can be solved via arbitrarily high inflation, yes. But it's also the setup for mass suffering and potentially revolution.

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