Comment by cman1444

>Because the global economy is one gigantic system of systems standing on top of the US financial system. When the US has a gigantic economic shock it ripples worldwide. But de-dollarization is gradual, so it will be a gradual drawdown in international economies.

This is where you're losing me. You seem to be suggesting that de-dollarization will cause a US financial pain large enough that it will cause significant pain to other countries, AND that it will happen so fast that the de-dollarization itself (which was the impetus for this pain!) will not be sufficient to shield them from it.

>The US is where people put their money because putting it elsewhere was riskier. But now the US might be more risky. So you diversify... to the places that were risky before. So you can only move to risky places. That risk eventually leads to some loss. It's a "least-worst option" situation, but the end result isn't going to be great.

Lots of assumptions here: 1. That the US is in fact becoming a much riskier place to invest (mostly only true for countries at risk of sanctions). 2. Other countries have stayed as risky as they always have been (do we know this isn't the case?). 3. That despite the inherent risk advantages of diversification to a wide range of countries/currencies is not significant enough to overcome the level of risk that the US has increased recently.

>That's now how capitalism works, that's how rich people work. The echo chamber of HN is full of upper-middle-class people with disposable incomes that are happy to waste money to feel emotionally better about their choices. But businesses aren't emotional, they're competitive. They want lower costs and higher profits. That means spending less. If a business can use a model that's 1/6th the price to get approximately the same results, they're going to do that, in order to gain a competitive edge. China is the place you go when you want to cut costs.

It is how capitalism works sometimes. If the cost of using the new technology is very cheap AND top-of-the-line options result in significant productivity increases, most companies will be willing to pay higher multiples of cost for even marginal increases in performance.

If I'm so-and-so software company spending millions on various business costs, I dont care if I'm spending .5% of my costs on claude code when I could be spending .1% on deepseek. I want the best one (even if it's just slightly better) because the costs are marginal anyway.