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Comment by jxf | Hacker News Reader

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?

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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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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?

Turns out asymmetry plays an important role here...

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.

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.

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