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this post was submitted on 11 Jul 2023
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United States | News & Politics
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Seems like a totally sustainable situation.
It is a good thing. You shouldnt look at total debt, but the service costs of holding such debts. A country with massive debt doesnt pay it, it will refinance it. We figured out about 5 years ago that debt isnt finite for a country. Op is a meme poster with zero clue on how money works.
https://www.imf.org/en/Publications/WP/Issues/2018/04/11/Interest-Growth-Differentials-and-Debt-Limits-in-Advanced-Economies-45794
Its free to read and you can inform yourself on why you shouldn't worry about these things.
Looking at the replies from OP he doesnt really grasp how debt works so I wouldnt listen to his odd takes.
The idea that you can have infinite debt because you can finance it for an infinite length of time only holds true as long as people have faith in the economic system. The point of the post is clearly to show that OP has a decreasing amount of faith that the money will ever be paid back, leading to a declining sentiment towards the dollar.
Imagine peddling QE while claiming other people have zero clue how money works. 😃
You should learn a bit about how debt works yourself. US has been able to effectively create unlimited debt by virtue of the dollar being the global reserve and being needed for countries to buy essential things like oil that modern economies need to function. When US prints money, it gets absorbed by other countries. That's the magic trick US has been using. Now, countries are starting to dedollaraize and demand for US currency is dropping. Meanwhile, you don't need dollars to buy things like oil now either. And that's where the problem for US comes in. Actual economists, such as Micheal Hudson, have explained this dynamic in great detail. One example being here https://valdaiclub.com/a/valdai-papers/valdai-papers-116/
Maybe try educate yourself a bit on the subject before making personal attacks on people out of sheer ignorance.
Do you really believe you can make conclusions based on 2 or 3 factors? Or are you mad most people that studied for this dont support your outrageous claim?
You are delusional red funny fellow.
What an amazing counterpoint you've mustered there.
Im not arguing with people that argue in bad faith. Have a nice day.
😂
Yeah, not many are actually dedollarizing. The big ones are China, Russia, Brazil, Argentina, S. Africa, and Iran, and there are a few others. But most of these already don't do a ton of trade with the US because they're not on good terms politically and economically.
The common thread here is that most of these countries have one or more of the following:
In other words, they're not turning to the yuan because they think it's better than the dollar, but because they're desperate, and I'm guessing they have deals with China that are likely more beneficial to China than the countries themselves (i.e. China may be helping bail them out in exchange for some leverage).
So I'm not too worried about the yuan or another currency supplanting the dollar in a real, meaningful sense. That said, I do think it's concerning that the US has such a large amount of deficit spending. However, I trust the US dollar more than the yuan.
BRICS has already surpassed G7 in terms of GDP when adjusted for PPP, and that's the main force behind dedollarization. What is likely to happen is that there will be two parallel economies for global trade. One will be based on the US dollar and another on the BRICS currency.
What that means for US is that dollar based trade is shrinking, and along with it the demand for dollar. So, when US does a bunch of QE, there won't be the same level of demand for the dollar as there war previously.
Meanwhile, the yuan in particular is valuable to countries for the simple reason that China is the biggest trading partner for majority of the countries now. Countries can always convert yuan into something tangible they need from China. The dollar has no inherent value behind it.
Which currency might that be though? Don't get me wrong, I'd love to see a world where we don't have to pitch in to US spending by solely using dollars for trade, but I don't see any BRICS currencies being able to rise in the next 30 years to be even in the same league as the dollar.
The plan is to have a currency that's backed by a basket of commodities that BRICS countries produce. Given that BRICS countries are where most of commodities and manufacturing is located, I definitely see a rapid rise for such a currency. Especially coupled with projects like BRI that China is aggressively pushing. China will be building infrastructure in developing countries on a massive scale, and all the trade that will result from that will most likely be done in the BRICS currency.
I'd like a source for that, because I'm pretty sure the EU is the biggest trading partner for a majority of countries. Yeah, it's not a country per se, but it acts as one when it comes to trade.
And I'm not sure what you mean by the yuan having more inherent value. Fiat currencies have no inherent value, they're only worth what you can trade them for. So it really doesn't matter if you hold yuan, dollars, or pounds, they can be easily exchanged for another reserve currency for transactional purposes.
How much the country backing the currency exports isn't particularly important. Maybe it was hundreds of years ago when mercantilism was relevant, but it isn't relevant today.
As the yuan grows in popularity, the dollar will certainly lose some status, but it's not likely to crash. Look at what happened to the pound when the dollar supplanted it, or the yen when Japan's economic growth slowed, both are still valuable and stable currencies today. So the yuan gaining popularity doesn't spell doom for the US, it just means monetary policy will need to adjust to manage changes in demand. That's it.
https://www.wilsoncenter.org/blog-post/china-top-trading-partner-more-120-countries
I mean that countries buy products from China which means that they can always convert yuan into something they need. This was basically the premise behind petrodollar as well. When you could only buy oil in dollars, that made dollar valuable as an international currency.
Of course it's important, it's why Russia is currently trading with India in yuan instead of rupees. They can't spend rupees on anything they need, but they can spend yuan.
Both UK and Japan are in an incredibly precarious economic situation right now, and US has astronomic debt servicing of which is directly tied to global demand for dollars. If this demand starts shrinking then US will not be able to service the debt and will be forced to default.
If you have any reserve currency, you can convert it to something you need because many other countries accept it for trade. That's the whole point of being a reserve country.
If you hold dollars, you can use them to buy things from the EU, Mexico, etc because they accept dollars for trade. You aren't locked in to buying from the US, and the US honestly doesn't export that much anyway. The reason people like trading in dollars isn't because of the things you can buy from the US with it, but because it's an established currency that isn't likely to see surprising changes in valuation or monetary policy. It has nothing to do with the US producing a ton of physical goods.
The yuan will only "win" if they can prove that their currency is more stable than other currencies, and that will take decades to establish trust.
The Indian rupee isn't a reserve currency, the yuan is. So Russia can use yuan to trade with other countries easier than it can rupees, and both countries will have yuan on hand because it's a reserve currency.
That's the same way with pounds, yen, and euros. People use them not because they intend to buy things with them from the UK, Japan, or the EU, but because both parties in the transaction have them since they're established reserve currencies.
That's a bit hyperbolic.
Japan is seeing stagflation largely because their population is dropping, and that's due to cultural and policy choices. If you look at their domestic policy, they're actively trying to increase the birth rate to get things back on track. If they can't, they'll need to loosen up their immigration policies, which is culturally unattractive to them.
The UK is having issues because of "Brexit," yet the economy remains relatively strong despite half-committing to exiting the EU. It's a temporary thing.
Both countries have a clear reason for the economic situation they're in, and they're both reversible. Also, their respective currencies have remained relatively stable during that time as well. They're both still incredibly prosperous, they're just not growing as much as they'd like to.
The concern with dollars now is that if US has a beef with your country then they can just steal your reserve funds and cut you out of trade. This obviously isn't a concern for the vassals, but it's increasingly becoming a concern for countries that want to retain their sovereignty.
We're already seeing lots of trade happening in yuan, and the trend is only growing. It's a self reinforcing process because as more countries use yuan for trade the more it becomes legitimized and thus more attractive for other countries.
Yuan is not a reserve currency at the moment.
It's absolutely not, economic fundamentals are terrible in both countries, and standard of living is rapidly declining. UK issues go far beyond brexit which has become a popular reason to blame all the problems in UK on. Brexit simply accelerated many underlying trends that have been developing since at least Thatcher days.
While the problems may be reversible in theory, it's pretty clear that such reversals are not really possible given the political climate in these countries. The trends that are happening will continue accelerating going forward.
In economics it's hard to say something for certain until it has been carried out by a big macroeconomical subject, and if what you mean is something of infinite debt accumulation, it's even harder to measure it because it can mean that at any point there could be a non prevented scenario where things didn't go as planned. I doubt there has ever been a case in history of an entity with so much debt, and while maybe it works as is described here, it can also mean that it could act in a totally different way under a different scenario. For example one where a country who's currency is used globally stops being so. Time will tell, I guess. I'd love to see some quotes about how this paper says things work, if you have read it.
This works until it doesn't, and then it really doesn't.