Comment by dzonga
11 hours ago
Japan is the sort of canary in the coal mine.
so yeah if the yen pops - then the u.s will too given all the 'a.i' shenanigans & the market manipulation with oil.
but I guess the US Treasurer is willing to manipulate the market till they can't.
Can you elaborate?
at some point, the SPR runs dry
As will the SDR.
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special_drawing_rights>
Japan is a what? They've been dumping billions of dollars and trillions of yen into their economy since the 1990s. How is this any different than the past thirty years of intervention? I stg you guys. I get that ginning up a conspiracy gives you agency in a powerless world but come on.
While I don't agree with the phrasing of the above comment it doesn't seem factually wrong?
The article states similar coordinated currency manipulation (to instead weaken the yen) happened in 2011 after the Tohoku earthquake. There was a bunch of mutual currency manipulation in the 1990s by the US and Japan.[1] In the 1980s there was the Plaza and Louvre accords. [2][3] And you can find more going all the way back to end of World War 2.
The main interesting difference in the current intervention is that the US is selling euros (not dollars) to buy yen.
[1] https://www.nber.org/papers/w8914
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plaza_Accord
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louvre_Accord
Not really a conspiracy theory, it’s just an indicator of the underlying issues either the global economy. Yeah it’s been red for decades, it just shows there are segment of the world economy that are under high stress.
Difference is US now has its own issues which just makes the overall situation even more fragile.
No one knows for how long or what happens next, but you can’t look at things and think, eh it’s just the way it is. Things are a certain way until they’re not
If you can manipulate the market why not do it?
Literally no one benefits from the alternative.
Manipulation of the market never comes for free.
You just delay, and render unpredictable, the eventual reckoning, for short-term benefits.
It will be interesting to see who’s gonna blame the free market when that day arrives.
> You just delay, and render unpredictable, the eventual reckoning, for short-term benefits.
After a century, those short-term benefits add up to a long term benefit.
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Manipulating the market is literally the job of both the Treasury and the FOMC. It’s how we enact monetary policy.
We need an alternative, because a nation servicing interest on debt as its #1 fiscal line-item is historically irrecoverable #2027 #ThisTimeIsDifferent?
My proposed alternative is that we must accept (as individual nations, perhaps some even balkanized) that austerity measures are irreversible, globally. We cannot help everybody. We should not help anybody until we've helped our own countrymen/fellow-neighbors, first.
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Even Warren Buffett agrees (and his heavily interviewed) espousing the necessity of taxing high net-worth individuals at higher rates (in his definition, $20M+ net-worth). He is not alone in Billionaires quotes similarly.
No Trillionaire has yet agreed with this statement, and fortunately this "accomplishment" must again (thankfully IMHO) wait to become precedent.
> Literally no one benefits from the alternative.
Future you might disagree with present you. But even if we disregard time, I think millions of consumers would benefit from the opportunity to have competitive markets again. If an actual economic forest fire was allowed to burn, we might eliminate some of the too-big-to-fail corruption and oligopoly that is the norm now and provide space for new seeds to grow.
The problem with this idea which is common in some circles is that most of the businesses involved are commodity or lowish margin. They likely got built either with government support or before the current margin's were a thing. Becdause you can't make a high enough ROI on building a new competitor your seeds will likely die in barren soil never having germinated. In today's markets the likely result will be increased business going to China, India, Vietnam and the like. If you're talking about banking then the worst possible scenario at a national level is that you're borrowing money denominated in a foreign currency. The adventure after 1929 was a result of deliberate policy to liquidate and let it burn.
You can’t have competition forever. At some point someone wins decisively, and then there is only the illusion of competition.
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