“I will need a translation. Is the debt referred to here the same as the $40T debt? I dont see how we buy back our own debt.”
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If we buy back $100 of existing debt for $60 obtained by new debt we’ve reduced our total outstanding debt by $40.
I get that, if the debt is owed to someone else willing to sell it at less than the amount. (I thought I expressed that). But is this the same debt as the 40T we watch on the debt clock? I thought we owe that to ourselves. Its convoluted to me.
This sort of shell-gamery is one reason why any person with sense and integrity is very much put off by financiers and their manic lying.
At any rate, Milei had to do some of this legerdemain to help Argentina from going off the cliff into the abyss.
Seems to be having some success, therefore we SHOUD be mimicking him, yet we most certainly will not, as is par for the course in US Government finances.
D*C#h&@ds of a very educated variety have for DECADES sworn that the national debt was nothing but an ethereal, economic, academic, construct that had nothing to do with real debt.
The High Priest of this #0r$e$#*t was John Maynard Keynes, the 'brains' behind fiat currency printing/spending and running up astronomical national debts unto collapse.
He was the Confessor to Roosevelt and many other New Deal gurus and nitwits. He was the Pope of every university economics department in the United States for the past 90 years or so.
So everyone in economics, and anyone who took Econ 101, believes that you can just run up public debt to ridiculous, astronomical levels, and somehow it is all perfectly OK because the debt really doesn't exist.
Yes this is insanity but it is polished, leatherbound, lectured, and agreed-upon, official, even timeworn insanity, therefore it carries with it the respectability, weight, and timbre of the most momentous intellectual ideas, like Maxwell's Equations or the Principle of Relativity.
Now back to reality: We need to snap out of it and realize that all the lies of Keynes and the Nobel economists (with very few exceptions) are just total bu11$#*T. We are on the verge of an American hyperinflation and collapse, leading to the world ditching the Dollar forever as serious currency for international finance. It is a nightmare and a ruin that we are right now dipping our feet into and foolishly seeming to like.
But if anyone is willing to do anything, basically the acceptable methods of trying not to be destroyed by this situation are "to restructure" (= "to cheese out of") our debt in part, to STOP OVERSPENDING IMMEDIATELY, and to start retiring debt by means of all the neoplastic economic productivity growth that is supposed to accompany the AI Boom, thus bootstrapping us out of this impending catastrophe and collapse.
Frankly, I can't see how the average person's asking ChatGPT to make a picture of his family cat playing poker among the traditional bowler-wearing, cigar-smoking dogs, is going to help us much in the productivity department.
But that is Bessent and POTUS's story, and they are sticking with it.
Hows about buying back $40 trillion dollars of debt for $400 Billion dollars of debt.