Washington Is Quietly Repudiating Its Debts | Hacker News Reader

Washington Is Quietly Repudiating Its Debts

cato.org

13 pointshelveticaman9 comments

This title is pretty misleading. The author claims that inflation is "implicitly repudiating debt". This is really not how the phrase "repudiating debt" is used.

Nobody is too surprised when the dollar suffers inflation. But it would be shocking if the U.S. actually refused to honor T-bills.

Also, the devaluation of the dollar is hardly new. The dollar has been weakening vs the euro since early 2006.

http://finance.yahoo.com/currency/convert?from=USD&to=EU...

Don't get me wrong, inflation is bad, and it hurts the poor who are honestly trying to save the worst. But it isn't the end of the world. It's not even nearly as bad as the 70's, inflation-wise. The real danger is in the hard-to-predict "black swan" disasters that could still happen.

Is anyone getting depressed by all this? I'm starting to feel physically sick whenever I read about the economy. I think maybe I need to stop reading the news for a while. I felt the same way after 9/11.

Yes. It is depressing. Just remember 3 things:

1) During an election year, everybody thinks the economy sucks. So there is a bias there to consider, even though there are honest-to-god issues here.

2) We still make things people want, to put it in hacker terms. Movies, games, ideas, businesses. Yes, we've moved up from manufacturing to services and ideas, but we still make a lot of things a lot of people want. That's not changing.

3) Wall Street "blows up" about every ten years or so. Our system is not a magic forumula, so there are always loopholes. Smart people will always play into these loopholes until the system becomes unstable. At this point we fix the holes and keep going. The trick is to just fix the part that is broken and not try to outsmart the market, which you can't do. That's tough for politicians to do.

Long term? We live in a society where politicians get elected making promises (or wars) that nobody has to pay for. That keeps the voters voting, but it will cause our credit to self-destruct, probably in our lifetime.

But even then, life goes on. The fundamentals remain sound, ie, we're really good at making stuff other people will pay us for. As long as the fundamentals remain sound, and as long as your personal fundamentals remain sound (you are good at doing something people will pay you for) then we're just going to keep muddling through it all. The world is not ending.

It's not true that "during an election year, everybody thinks the economy sucks". Recent counterexamples are 2000 and 1996.

inside the USA, treasury notes cannot default. by a 1982 law they can just create an account at a fed member bank and assign it to the payee.

the issue is whether these dollars are worth anything

i would argue that if the US debt hits $25 trillion, its over. the dollar will die and with it the US govt.

Not to be argumentative, but I would be curious about the the $25 trillion figure - where does it come from? It seems very big, and very round for me.

I'm far from an economic expert, so I'm interested in hearing about how you calculated the figure.

I don't know about the $25t figure, but the unfunded obligations (i. e.: debt + Social Security + Medicare + etc...) amount to $59t

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_public_debt

the $25 trillion point is pure speculation. i merely suggest this as a tipping point

This is not unreasonable. Adam Smith said that no country had ever paid its debt after it had exceeded a certain threshold.

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