The World’s $100T Fiscal Timebomb Keeps Ticking | Hacker News Reader

The World’s $100T Fiscal Timebomb Keeps Ticking

bloomberg.com

30 pointsmfiguiere79 comments

The idea of the "world debt level" being alarming doesn't make a lot of sense to me. There isn't anyone else we _could_ owe money to, right? I'm not educated enough in global finance to have a useful opinion in this, but imagine the following scenario:

    * Country A owes $100M to Country B
    * Country B owes $100M to Country C
    * Country C owes $100M to Country A

Here, the "world debt level" is $300M. But if country C pays $100M to country A, who then pays it to country B, who then pays it to country C, you'll have settled all three debts and no net money changed hands.

If you multiplied all the debts here by a factor of 1,000,000, you'd get a "$100T fiscal timebomb" for each country. But how much of a big deal is that in this hypothetical scenario when they don't, on a net basis, actually owe any money at all?

Some of the debt is even A holds B’s debt and B holds A debt. Example: US and Japan.

The debts can be in different currencies, or at different maturities, you can't just cancel them out.

I'm kind of with you, but I think you may be leaving out the impact of defaults and the cascading effect when country B ends up not being able to satisfy that debt?

Yeah if you want to know what the net debt on earth at any one time, the answer is easy: $0.

Until we start borrowing space dollars from aliens, every debt is someone else's credit, every liability is someone else's asset. The global debt must sum to zero.

That only works if you assume that all debts will eventually be repaid in full. But in reality some companies go bankrupt and some of their creditors will have lost money.

What's more important than the absolute debt levels is the various marginal financial flows they generate - interest payments, derivative trades, ...

It's in a highly unstable meta-equilibrium.

You're ignoring interest. If there is 100T of outstanding debt at 3% annual interest, that's 3T in interest per year. At a certain point it may be impossible to keep the overall interest payments going and the debt graph will collapse like dominoes.

The great recession was also mainly caused by debts within the US economy.

So country A pays 3% to country b, who pays 3% to country c who pays 3% to country A

What happens when country A can't pay?

Very bad things, or maybe very good things, depends on your perspective, a reset in any case and a restructuring of debt, usually just after a crash.

Which isn’t free either. Consider the interest levels of countries considered unstable vs those considered stable (UK/US compared to Türkiye/Argentina for example). It massively changes what actions the respective governments can take.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_debt_crisis

Everything old is new again.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OrhJcqgXrlw

You’re ignoring inflation. At 2.5% inflation, this is a 0.5% real interest rate.

Inflation can only come with an increase in the money supply and the money supply only increases by issuing debt, which carries more interest.

Not true. Inflation is defined as the increase in the cost of goods. This can come about by an increase in money supply, a reduction in demand for the money that exists, a restriction in supply of certain goods or an increase in the demand for enough key goods. I’m not an economist so I’m sure one could come up with more examples.

No, inflation is only because of an increase in the money supply, which is increased by lending in modern economies. Rulers will make false definitions and false measurements in order to try to hide this. Just as Roman emperors would debase the metal in their currency and demand that people treated the money as pure. But the truth is still the truth, no matter the lies.

Actual economists and monetary policy staff disagree with you:

1. HBR: https://hbr.org/2022/12/what-causes-inflation

2. IMF: https://www.imf.org/en/Publications/fandd/issues/Series/Back...

3. Reserve Bank of Australia: https://www.rba.gov.au/education/resources/explainers/causes...

4. The Bank of England: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Cant-Just-Print-More-Money-ebook/dp...

Shall I continue?

The pope says he's appointed by God. So it must be true...

Your sources are as truthful about inflation as asking any general if he's fighting for the good side of a war.

> The pope says he's appointed by God. So it must be true...

Carlos Jobim says he’s the expert on finance and monetary policy so it must be true. He doesn’t need things like evidence, experts, research or data. His word is the truth.

Your sources are organizations that derive all their power from inflating the monetary supply. They have reason to lie always.

I think you need to get off r/Superstonk and return to the real world.

During the era of the Soviet Union, all institutions and all science within their sphere of influence agreed unanimously that socialism was a superior system in all ways measurable. The people believed it. Probably most academics believed it, as well as leaders of institutions. In the highest echelon they were painfully aware of the shortcomings of their system, but it was still inconceivable to admit what was really going on.

In the future you will probably read books and memoirs from international banking leaders, speaking more unfiltered about how they had to keep the truth from the population, just as we today can read the memoirs of previous Soviet leaders admitting their lies and failure.

When you talk about economists as an authority, do you think anybody could get a tenure or a degree unless they believe in inflation as a mysterious force and not man-made? Probably as likely as somebody getting a degree in political science in the USSR without being a socialist.

> In the future you will probably read books and memoirs from international banking leaders, speaking more unfiltered about how they had to keep the truth from the population, just as we today can read the memoirs of previous Soviet leaders admitting their lies and failure.

No, we really won't.

Ok, you are right, let's end this "discussion".

We agree on one thing: this wasn’t a discussion. It was you embarrassing yourself in public.

When people don't want to talk to you anymore, it doesn't always mean that you're right. You should take that advice into real life.

> No, inflation is only because of an increase in the money supply

Japan increasing its money supply but having long stretches of low inflation (and even deflation) for the last ~twenty years:

* https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=1680i

National budgets are complicated. Part of that is revenue from interest on debt issuance. Another part is borrowing to make up for deficits. If all debtors stop paying, revenue has to be adjusted by the expected rate of return - this is not equal, even if the amounts borrowed are. In turn, creditors will stop buying debt if they cannot make a return on interest: that means either spending has to be reduced by the debtor nation, taxes have to go up, or money printing has to begin. In cases like the EU countries that gave up their sovereign currency, printing is not an option.

It's not as simple as canceling out all the credits and debits. Flows matter.

Such debt would be cancelled and is not problematic. The problematic one is government owing money to citizens or institutions (domestic or foreign). If USA owes 100B to a pension fund in Japan and Japan owes 100B to pension fund in USA then there is no way to cancel it. Governments have to pay the money back with interest and at some point it becomes significant burden to tax payers. It's problematic especially when those tax payers aren't the ones who benefited from spending the debt was taken to finance.

The solution will always be inflation and devaluation. Your millions will start to feel like thousands and your billions will start to feel like millions. The first trillionaire will not be far off but because of unhappy circumstances.

Inflation is a middle ground between respecting the debt and canceling the debt. Depending on amount of inflation and time window, the government can reach any point in the (0%, 100%) debt cancelation interval.

There is no way to cancel these debts because the creditors and debtors are different. The parent comment assumed creditors and debtors are the same.

That debt represents a trade Japanese people made: they get to take away 100B of US production to enjoy their old age. In trade they gave the US government something. Oil. Toyotas. Whatever. The US government helpfully made that trade, promising US babies would, once grown up, deliver on that 100B of, say, labour. The real problem is that neither the US government nor (now grown up) US babies intend to hold up their end of the bargain. And vice-versa.

The money is owed to our future selfs or generations to come, who pay the interests.

If the money obtained through debt is well invested such that it creates growth that outpaces the interest rate then all is good, as future tax payers will have a larger economy to be taxed in order to pay that debt. But if it's not, we are just stealing from the future.

When a country acquires debt to finance its pension system, that's just plain and simply inter-generational robbery. It's pensioners voting to give themselves money at the expense of the younger generations. It will become more and more pervasive across the west given our demographics and is crippling entire economies across Europe.

This response does not address the parent's question, and ignores that issuing currency with a debt mechanism isn't anything but an artificial constraint (not an immutable law of nature).

Money is the way we divide up the productive capacity of a country. To become richer as a nation, you increase the productive capacity of a country, you don't collect little pieces of paper.

Debt is not money though, debt is a future claim on some portion of that output and that claim is to the whole comingled basket of productive capacity that took out the debt so in a country's case itis a claim on all of it because a country can income tax and/or wealth tax up to 100 % of the income/wealth. So a coubtry can get richer by increasing capacity more than the claim on capacity or it can decrease the claim on capacity freeing up output for the country.

Which is why who holds the debt is more important than the existence of the debt. If the government owes the money to a pension fund that's a good thing. If they owe it to a foreign adversary, it's not.

Thats just not true at all. If the debt was incurred inveating in s(mething thatcpays higher yields than tge debt service or possibly inlfation cost it may be a good thing. If its mallinvested or wasted on current consumption its a bad thing in almost all instances. Who holds it is only relevant as far as what sort of financial damage they can do selling it off.

If it's invested in something that increases the productive capacity of the country, it's a good thing.

Investing in consumption increases demand and increases inflation.

Investing in capacity increases supply and decreases inflation.

What I said is a subset of what you are claiming and it's the actually true part. There are lots of investments that increase productive capacity that are bad on pretty much any sane metric (i.e bridges to nowhere, sweetheart deals for new professional sports stadium construction, speculative factory subsidies, especially in rapidly evolving technology fields like the travesty that happened in solar panel manufacture a few years ago).

No you said "s(mething thatcpays higher yields than tge debt service or possibly inlfation cost"

That's nowhere close to the same thing. Productive assets like road infrastructure often has no payback because the government gives them away for free.

And the reason we're losing to China is because China invested in hundreds of Solyndras. You're learning the wrong lesson from Solyndra.

Turns out asymmetry plays an important role here...

Overall, the US is doing things that were supposed to be impossible a few decades ago. And Treasury keeps printing money. More importantly, the debt markets are relatively healthy.

Nobody talks about 'crowding out' anymore.

I don't follow monetary policy anymore, but I do know this era is unique and the old rules really don't apply anymore. The fact is, there aren't really any good places to put your money except for the US, and the Us is taking full advantage of that.

We are seeing huge issues with assets inflating. Housing being one of the big ones.

I dont see how the US dosent hyperinflate its way out of its issues.

Bitcoin is pushing $69k (again) and gold/silver are both ATH.

I personally view this as an indication that a lot of people agree with your statement.

https://archive.ph/vALFM

What if... governments just wait for people, they owe money to, to die of old age..?

I’m going to guess Warren Buffet’s descendants will still expect to be paid.

>As of August 2024, Warren Buffett's company Berkshire Hathaway held $234.6 billion in U.S. Treasury bills, or T-bills. This is more than the Federal Reserve's $195 billion in holdings.

Most of the creditors are institutions. Like Social Security, Pension Funds, Fortune 500 Treasury departments. These will be here for a really long time.

Debts don't work that way. When someone owes you money that's an asset. Assets generally transfer on death. The government is the one where if it died the debt would go away. At a certain point that might be the only way out for them.

Maybe this time is different for real, but people make this sort of prediction or warning every year for as long as I can remember. Meanwhile, the S&P 500 and Nasdaq have consistently posted annual double-digit real returns. So what? What do we do with this information? Yeah, there is a lot of debt, but the economy is bigger too.

But a large chunk of taxes goes to pay off the debt

And who gets that pay off? And what do they do with it once they get it?

Rich people. More yachts.

I seem to get to chime in on questions like this repeatedly (those karma points won't delete themselves.) Lets watch hackernews stubbornly avoid conversations about power and in this case how its accumulated to instead myopically focus on the technical/symbolic stand-ins for power.

Only because policy makers choose to do so. They could just as easily create the money the pay off the debt out of thin air. But doing so wouldn’t make sense. Governments will never pay off the debt because doing so would not be good macroeconomic policy. The debt doesn’t exist to be paid off.

Governments don’t handle national accounts in the same way households manage their budgets. Don’t think about them the same way.

Well the past two years showed us that the Fed (the institution that can create money out of thin air) will not do that if inflation goes up. Paying debt with money created from thin air will cause inflation and then the Fed will stop making money out of nothing.

Yup, but whats the goal here? To reduce debt to 0 and use taxes to directly fund governments? Is it believed that this will lead to a lower tax burden for all? Has this been achieved by any modern country?

Under President Clinton 25 years ago there was a budget surplus.

Yes and that was either because the Clinton administration decided that shrinking the money supply was the right macroeconomic policy, or that they decided that a Democrat president delivering a budget surplus was good politics. At the time both were plausible.

Taxes curb inflation. They print money to pay off debts.

> Meanwhile, the S&P 500 and Nasdaq have consistently posted annual double-digit real returns

This part scares me. Are they supposed to? Are we way above trend for average growth? Mean reversion? Is the market just pricing in a lot of upcoming economic growth due to rates coming down + AI? More growth?…

Yes we are incredibly above the mean.

https://www.currentmarketvaluation.com/models/s&p500-mean-re...

The problem with this site/all of these indicators is you could/would use these as a reason to 'sit out' and not be as "highly exposed/long" as you should be, and... you would have missed out big returns lately...

Which goes into... do the suggestions/rules of yesterday apply to today? Evidence sort of at the moment shows no.

Sitting out when it reached these levels in the past would have been highly profitable. 1969, 2000, 2021…

Past performance is no guarantee of future results

Sadly, my wife of 20 years knows this all too well.

This look great until they do not. Looking at many stocks would you own them at current valuations if you did not expect massive future growth... Or some other speculative valuation future. Same can be said for houses and commercial real estate. Why not art and collectibles as well.

In many cases one could think that prices really do not make always lot of sense. But nearly everyone wants them to go up. So lot is done to make them go up.

> Maybe this time is different for real, but people make this sort of prediction or warning every year for as long as I can remember.

"Is the U.S. Going Broke?", Time Magazine cover, March. 13, 1972:

* https://content.time.com/time/covers/0,16641,19720313,00.htm...

What's up with Germany?

Memories of 1920s

My impression is that the Germans have been anti-debt ever since [1] led to some pretty catastrophic repercussions (culminating in WWII)

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperinflation_in_the_Weimar_R...

> My impression is that the Germans have been anti-debt ever since [1] led to some pretty catastrophic repercussions (culminating in WWII)

Hyper-inflation occurred in the 1920s in Germany (and other countries in the same region, at the same time). In the 1930s, when Hitler managed to grab power after being appointed Chancellor, it was austerity that was in fashion:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Austerity:_The_History_of_a_Da...

* https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/13484866-austerity