Posted on 04/19/2024 6:41:44 AM PDT by ChicagoConservative27
It’s practically an international article of faith: Countries may not default on their sovereign debt. Yet China has done just that on $1 trillion it owes to U.S. bondholders. Is there nothing we can do about it?
Finding members of Congress willing to talk tough isn’t hard. Many resolutions and joint letters over decades have called for China to honor its debt to U.S. citizens. But too many members, their election coffers lined by Wall Street and other financial and business interests heavily exposed to China, leave it at that.
OPINION>FINANCE THE VIEWS EXPRESSED BY CONTRIBUTORS ARE THEIR OWN AND NOT THE VIEW OF THE HILL Lawmakers want to make China pay its trillion-dollar debt to Americans BY ANDREW HALE, OPINION CONTRIBUTOR - 04/19/24 7:00 AM ET SHARE POST the Philippines president and
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It’s practically an international article of faith: Countries may not default on their sovereign debt. Yet China has done just that on $1 trillion it owes to U.S. bondholders. Is there nothing we can do about it?
Finding members of Congress willing to talk tough isn’t hard. Many resolutions and joint letters over decades have called for China to honor its debt to U.S. citizens. But too many members, their election coffers lined by Wall Street and other financial and business interests heavily exposed to China, leave it at that.
That makes the action of Sen. J.D. Vance (R-Ohio) all the more noteworthy. He recently introduced a bill to address the People’s Republic of China’s selective default on American bondholders of Chinese sovereign debt.
The bill follows Vance’s history of bipartisan work with senators such as Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) to call out Wall Street, as well as China, for its corruption and abuse of U.S. laws.
(Excerpt) Read more at thehill.com ...
The difference being that it's not the U.S. govt that owns the China debt, it's American citizens (heirs of the investors who bought the Chinese railroad bonds a century ago).
Don’t China and many other countries hold trillions of dollars of American debt, money that we owe them? Suppose they ask for repayment as bonds come due, rather than reinvesting in more of our bonds?
Everyone should pay their bills, but it strikes me that this subject is part of a larger piece of international bond sales by many other countries. There could be repercussions if we would try to force this issue.
Curiously, a year or two ago, China owned about $1 trillion in USA Treasury debt.
Cancel interest payments on their USA bonds, confiscate their principal, and call it even?
In 2024, that number is in the $800-$850 billion range.
They have been cutting back for two years.
Comically, they were being paid less than 1% (annually) on most of their USA debt when they decided to cut back.
Today, a 28-day USA Treasury Bill is paying 5.4% (annually)!
Yeah, we know. We have a turncoat collaborationist speaker who resembles that remark.
Note that the pre-1949 KMT bonds were to be paid in gold - not some government paper fiat currency. So no wonder it is still worth to argue about repayment.
Contrast with present US Govt debt, which is all denominated in green pieces of paper. All bond-holders will definitely be paid - just fire-up the printing presses!
Yet China has done just that on $1 trillion it owes to U.S. bondholders. Is there nothing we can do about it?
If China won’t pay their debt to us then we are going to have to make the rich pay their fair share and make up the difference.
It’s for the children
Wouldn’t do a darn bit of good anyway since the Biden Administration spends a trillion every 100 days.
Are the CCP folks over their buying all that gold you read about so they can start paying us and others back the money they owe from when the Chicoms grabbed control from the Nationalists and chased them off shore to Formosa (Taiwan)?
There is a US state, Alabama or Georgia maybe, can’t recall the details, that to this day is prohibited from doing business or selling bonds in the city of London. Seems they defaulted on their bonds in the 1870s or something like that. Bankers have long memories.
The Alabama claims were a diplomatic dispute between the United States and Great Britain that arose out of the U.S. Civil War. The peaceful resolution of these claims seven years after the war ended set an important precedent for solving serious international disputes through arbitration, and laid the foundation for greatly improved relations between Britain and the United States.
Here's a good summary of the Confederacy debt position during the Civil war
Exactly; give them a big dose of the law of reciprocity: what you do to us, we can do to you.
We could start by seizing the Chinese purchased farmland so many here have been worried about.
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