Posted on 08/28/2023 9:05:27 AM PDT by SeekAndFind
Free ride? Really? Indeed, but we are involved in careeing down the free ride highway at full speed. Here is data, since I prefer information and sources to assertions.
2000 -- $5,674 and 55% debt to gdp ratio--- Stanne writes: "33 trillion in debt Hello!!! No our idiotic government dethroned it."
2001 -- $5,807 and 55% debt to gdp ratio
2002 -- $6,228 and 57% debt to gdp ratio
2003 -- $6,783 and 59% debt to gdp ratio
2004 -- $7,379 and 60% debt to gdp ratio
2005 -- $7,933 and 61% debt to gdp ratio
2006 -- $8,507 and 61% debt to gdp ratio
2007 -- $9,008 and 62% debt to gdp ratio
2008 -- $10,025 and 68% debt to gdp ratio
2009 -- $11,910 and 82% debt to gdp ratio
2010 -- $13,562 and 90% debt to gdp ratio
2011 -- $14,790 and 95% debt to gdp ratio
2012 -- $16,066 and 99% debt to gdp ratio
2013 -- $16,738 and 99% debt to gdp ratio
2014 -- $17,824 and 101% debt to gdp ratio
2015 -- $17,824 and 101% debt to gdp ratio
2016 -- $19,573 and 105% debt to gdp ratio
2017 -- $20,245 and 104% debt to gdp ratio
2018 -- $21,516 and 105% debt to gdp ratio
2019 -- $22,719 and 107% debt to gdp ratio
2020 -- $27,748 and 129% debt to gdp ratio
2021 -- $29,617 and 124% debt to gdp ratio
2022 -- $30,824 and 123% debt to gdp ratioAs 2023 is incomplete, the debt now rises quickly to $33 trillion, and only when we end this year will the final figure be known. It will pass the $33 trillion mark before year's end.
The latter conclusion links quite well to the first assertion of "seeking a free ride."
Its already been done.
Who did it?
Notice! IT DOESN’T MATTER WHO THE PRESIDENT IS OR WHICH PARTY CONTROLS CONGRESS. The deficit trend is the same.
This is ultimately going to be Joe Biden’s lasting legacy: the president who destroyed the U.S. dollar.
I didn’t mean to imply our government is a paragon of fiscal responsibility. Far from it. However, due to fortuitous circumstances nobody in our current government set up, we are better off than most of the other countries in the world. We benefit greatly from the fact that there isn’t any other better run. similar sized economies. We’re just luck as can be.
I love old cars. I read about them, I watch YouTube videos on them, and one thing often catches my eye. This or that car cost X dollars when new. Today that is ten, twenty, or thirty times as much money...for the same value. The dollar that I saved before Obama took office was worth about .13 cents when left office. He doubled the amount of dollars in circulation...not once, but twice. Then they did “quantitative easing” adding 87 billion dollars per month. It did nothing for economy. Why? Because he was a communist and everyone took their cash out of the economy and waited for Trump. It wasn’t so much Trump’s policies that made the economy shoot up, though they helped. It was all that cash flooding back into the economy that Obama had frightened away.
It’s the nature of our political system that we’ll never have a “stable” economy. It’s also the nature of our system that the rest of the world will be worse off... on average.
PGR88 writes, "BRICS are simply creating an informal alliance - waiting for the US to destroy itself. Our DC deep-state is indeed doing the job for them: going all-in with Ukraine, arresting former Presidents, promoting sexual degeneracy for political purposes, blowing-out government debt - all the BRICS have to do is sit back, watch our own woke-marxists tear the USA apart and protect themselves from the fall-out"
Salman observes: "The Democrats will dethrone the US dollar. Indeed they have already started. BRICS is not about fighting the USA. It's about preparing for the post-USA world as best they can. The key concept is not to get dragged down."
This is no longer a simple political issue becasue it has grown too large to be spun and managed by politics, and it did not arise out of the Ukraine/Russia war, for its roots go back quite a bit further.
"The fundamental transformation" bragged about by Obama began earlier, as I see it, with "war" turning into "nation building," which proved a wasteful exercise in, as one fateful example, Afghanistan. Waste. Libya. Waste. Color revolutions. Waste. Pandemic. Waste. Now the Z-P war. More waste. A few people and a few companies made billions throughout, and most lost.
The bigger picture is made up of many more big pictures, and become a tapestry of corruption.
At this point, you will get little argument from me. We will reap the whirlwind.
As of June 2023, active U.S. sanctions programs cover the following countries and regions, or companies and individuals within listed countries:
Afghanistan
The Balkans
Belarus
Burma
Central African Republic
China
Cuba
Democratic Republic of Congo
Ethiopia
Hong Kong
Iran
Iraq
Lebanon
Libya
Mali
Nicaragua
North Korea
Russia
Somalia
Sudan
South Sudan
Syria
Ukraine
Venezuela
Yemen
Zimbabwe
Find the Brics members. Lol.
*** bitcoin has entered the chat ***
Turkey has been the latest country to request their gold as they pulled 220 tons of gold out of the US Federal Reserve system on April 19, 2018. The countries 220 tons of gold is valued at $25.3 billion. Turkey has followed countries such as:
Germany
Netherlands
Austria
Belgium
Russia
China
Azerbaijan
But lets keep sending billions to Ukraine and other countries.
P4L
Brics is actively promoting a new multipolar world, the use of each countries own currency for trade.
Last week’s gathering in Johannesburg of the Brics – Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa – was another attempt to mount a challenge to the US-dominated international order.
The US Treasury secretary, Janet Yellen, has expressed concerns about the long-term consequences of using financial sanctions as a tool of American foreign policy, saying there was a risk “over time it could undermine the hegemony of the dollar”.
We didn’t play nice. We became the playground bully.
Our time is over. We blew it.
Thank you for adding something substantive. The notion of the US and the EC -- notice I did not say Europe, nor even the European Union, since there are opposition voices being consistently attacked from "above" -- playing a sanctions war is THE point.
When one believes one is the "champ," contenders arise. In sports as in business this is easily acknowledged as competition (of course you know that, but this is an "all" sort of comment).
From storytelling to real world history to sports to business, champs do not remain champs. Eventually new champions win.
I personally think the "neo-con" mentality -- which includes the Dems and RINOs in key positions -- though themselves to be king of the proverbial hill, which is a game after all. And no one remains king of a hill forever.
Contract law throughout the ages has been about trust. Sanctions, as we have been watching, is about breaking trust. The consequences are shaping up, and whatever the coming reality will be -- of course -- will be the reality.
The game since the awful Clintons forward (and the EC forward about the same time, 1995) has been one of thinking we're invincible. And we can break contracts, with the best of the world's contract breakers. The only contract we have not yet broken is "abrogation of debt," as a fine history collected from the IMF showed throughout the 20th century. Everybody did it somewhere along the line. National debt -- as a contract with counter-parties and all -- is the one contract we've tried to finesse away as the value of the dollar has dropped in purchasing power.
How about a peek at it for those unaware:
https://www.statista.com/statistics/1032048/value-us-dollar-since-1640/
Yeah, that's us. Invincible. So we are told in the moment about 32,731 trillion times....
Break contracts? While breaking treaties -- they are contracts too -- is for others, we have been breaking contracts aplenty. I expect more. And in time I expect an abrogation of the national debt. Like many other nations have done.
Peter St. Onge from the Mises Institute and Heritage Foundation has suggested a method. One among a number of proposals from various voices.
It is interesting to contemplate tomorrow. Because it's just around the corner.
As long as we put it on a credit card, and then skip town when the bill comes due, that seems like a darn good idea.... Until....
That would be an over SEVEN HUNDREDFOLD decrease in buying power after only eight years.
Are you sure you want to say that?
Regards,
Yes. Excellent comments. A "fragmented" (ie. nationalist) global monetary system is the historical norm, so indeed - why wouldn't history naturally trend back in that direction? Especially given that the global conditions that first created the Bretton Woods system after the devastation of WWII have disappeared, and the subsequent 30 years of American unipolarity and economic hegemony is disappearing quickly also.
My question is: what about gold? Imagine any small "3rd world" country trying to achieve stability and economic growth. For them earning, protecting, holding FX reserves in USD is really no different from having to earn and hold gold. Neither is a currency they control. Certainly the network-effects and ease for borrowing, and paying, in USD is more convenient.
But what if an interbank/international settlement system for settling in gold existed?
Every country is going to maintain their own currency but it will have to be backed by gold, silver or other hard assets. We are moving to a new global system. The Central banks are going bye bye.
“the dollar’s share of global foreign-exchange reserves fell below 59 percent in the final quarter of last year,”
Good points, but foreign reserves are not the best indicator. They are political rather than economic decisions.
Actual trade is still what matters, and US dollar transactions are still 85% of all currency exchanges.
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