Comment by d_burfoot
15 hours ago
> Firms in the broad Russell 3000 share index have a total market value of $79trn
I sometimes try to get people to worry about the catastrophic state of American public finances by pointing out that the net national debt, including unfunded liabilities, is estimated to be $175T [0]. The government could appropriate all the equity from the top 3000 largest companies, and also the entire real estate market, and it still would not be able to pay its debt (RE market is $55T).
The $175T number is unfair because it treats Social Security and Medicare/aid as a liability instead of the service that they are. You might as well say the US is in infinite debt, because we'll always be paying something for our military every year, so infinity years * any dollars = infinite debt.
Also: All of those numbers you use to scare people are way, way off.
> it treats Social Security and Medicare/aid as a liability instead of the service that they are
It's a liability because the U.S. has promised to pay it. We haven't committed to a level of military spending backed by our full faith and credit.
EDIT: Never mind! Apparently we can just cut social security payments.
The NATO treaty says that we have to maintain our ability to resist armed attack, so there is some minimum. And we’ve made public commitments to spend at least 2% of GDP (though that isn’t part of the treaty).
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Including all of the Social Security obligations for the current population is nonsense. For one it is money that will be paid from now for another ~60 years, and for 2 it's something that probably will just get cut as the trust fund starts getting into dire straits. It's not really an obligation if it's one act of congress away from being fixed (and without doing something like a debt jubilee that would destroy the dollar).
The rest of your article is complete bogus and the economic equivalent of climate change denial.
This misunderstands the power of monetization, or mistakes "dollars" having some kind of fixed "value." They do not. Whether one agrees with that or not, thinking of this as a "debt" problem where a hypothetical move is to appropriate equity- setting aside the fact that equity ALSO is not in a fixed unit of measure- anyway, thinking of appropriating equity to solve a public debt problem is a category error. That is how accounting works for business structures that exist within a monetary system but NOT for government and currency printers that define the monetary system. The MMT people are right about this. Public debt is a measure of private sector wealth. That is how the machine works.
[~] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_debt_of_the_United_St...
39T is just the outstanding value of all the Treasury instruments (T-bills, etc). The entitlement programs (SSA and Medicare) have made commitments to certain levels of service and payments that are far in excess of the revenues they bring in, that's what is meant by "unfunded liabilities".
The thing is that at these levels of debt, repayment is never the goal.
How can you use a word like “never” when this debt is literally unprecedented in the history of the world
It can never be repaid. Presumably the people in charge of generating it are not oblivious to this fact.
"If you owe the bank $100, that's your problem. If you owe the bank $100 million, that's the bank's problem."
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Well, will be interesting to see how this play out. The US federal debt repayments is already above $1trillion a year.
Repayment isn't a goal that anyone in the system should reasonably want. Federal debt is not like credit card debt. Debt is a product that the US Government sells. Me, being a big corporation or human, go to the USG and say "I need somewhere to park my money that is safeish from inflation". The USG sells me debt at X.Y% interest. The money now generates safe interest, which means its safeish from inflation. A world where the USG "repays the debt" is a world where this essential product is no longer available.
High levels of debt only signals high demand for this product.
This is super-counterintuitive, but the debt has little to do with the deficit. We could run a surplus and still be in the same level of debt (in fact, this would be a tremendous place to be). We could run a deficit and have no debt (just print money, duh). The decisions that go into column A generally do not impact the decisions our leaders have to make in column B, though there are of course convenient relationships between the two.
> Repayment isn't a goal that anyone in the system should reasonably want.
Repayment to $0 isn't a reasonable goal but there are a lot of problems with your argument.
The biggest question is about sustainability. Is the debt-to-GDP ratio stable/manageable and is the interest rate on the debt below the economy's growth rate? If the answer is no, you have a problem.
> High levels of debt only signals high demand for this product.
This is backwards. The amount of debt is set mostly by government supply, which is driven by deficits. The demand signal is the price, which in this case is the yield. If the demand was high, yields would drop as the amount of debt grew. Instead, we have rising debt and rising yields, which means supply outstrips demand.
The US no longer has a AAA sovereign credit rating for a reason. When Moody's (the last agency to downgrade the US) stripped the US of its AAA rating, it cited "rising debt and interest costs 'that are significantly higher than similarly rated sovereigns.'"
The biggest issue at this point isn't the principal, it's the interest. Interest is the fastest-growing line item in the federal budget. It's almost at $1 trillion/year now and expected to nearly double by 2035. You either have to cut from other spending or borrow more to pay the interest.
Your comment implies that this doesn't have a real cost, which is silly.
So the more people want US$ debt the more tbe US government must spend?
Government debt isn't like personal debt or business debt. The treasury can choose to not honur it, and there's nothing anybody can do about it. Of course they're not going to find a market to sell more debt to after that, but wouldn't you say they already have enough?
No sympathy for people and institutions who make deals with the devil and expect the government to forever enslave taxpayers to honour those deals and pay back with interest.
As mentioned defaults do shockingly little to change future funding. Its been years since i looked but its something like a few years of “cool down” on issuance and a few points of coupon premium. The economist has done some great, very accessible, articles on this over the years.
Second, its critical that treasury bonds are denominated in USD. The us gov controls the monetary policy and can choose to inflate away the debt over time. This is in contrast to EM debt where they get trapped with foreign denominated bonds. See also the tensions around EU debt, greece, etc.
> Of course they're not going to find a market to sell more debt to after that
Argentina is doing fine. The real constraint would be that defaulting on the debt would cause a credit crisis and bank collapses.
Pretty sure this is why the bankruptcy guy from NY was sent in
Not true
The powerful people holding the debt will seek to change the government to one that obeys them
The way I understand my money market settlement account at vanguard, is that it's all, or nearly all, treasuries. Treasury not honoring government debt would be the worst bank failure in the history of the world.
It would be bad for you, but you also deserve that because you have made a deal with the government to enslave young people to pay taxes on their labour in order to pay interest to you. Loosing all your investments in a bond default would be a very fitting consequence for what you have done so wickedly.
We also don’t have anywhere near $175 trillion in debt. That’s a crazy made up number.
...what does this have to do with these IPOs?