Left Radicalism and the Repudiation of Foreign Debt

[jordan179]

Visiting a local library's free bin (where the library lets you get some free books and magazines), I happened to find an issue of an old radical Left newsletter-style 'zine, named Z, from 1988. Intrigued, I picked it up and read some of the articles over lunch

Comments

[kalance]

While I know that China can't simply call up the US one day and demand their trillion dollars, one thing they could do that would cripple our position and credit would be to undersell that debt to a third party. Call up their neighbors and say, "uh, we don't want to get into too much detail why, but we'll sell you $1tn of US debt for 50 cents on the dollar," which could prompt a sell-off and devaluation of our debt around the world. Suddenly, no country will accept our treasury bonds because they doubt they're actually worth what we claim.

There's a saying somewhere along the lines of, "if a man owes you $100, you have power over him; if a man owes you a million dollars, he has power over you."

[luagha]

Yup. And then we can't buy crap from them and they crash too. It's quite the mess.

[kalance]

We're not the irreplaceable market that people think anymore. India is pretty much at our economic level these days, has three times our population, and is right next door. China could shift their exports to them with ease.

Twenty years ago when we were the largest single first-world market on the planet, yeah, we could have sat pretty and comfortable with the knowledge that we were the buying power on the planet.

That era is over. The US is now just one of many markets, and not even the biggest.

[banner]

The indian market isn't there yet. It may be one day, but much of india is still mired in poverty. Plus india and china don't get along very well.

[polaris93]

The radical Left -- or Left, period -- has these great big gaping windows of vulnerability in their platforms and theories based on a profound ignorance of any aspect of reality not known and understood by Marx and Engels. Which means their ideas about people and all our works is straight out of the mid-19th century. They don't understand systems science, or human biology, or phenomena such as entropy, which applies to every process in the universe, human and otherwise. Entropy always bats last -- and oh! how surprised they are when they have their noses rubbed in that fact. Again and again and again. Expecting repudiation of debt to benefit the debtor is like trying to build a perpeptual-motion machine, and just as futile, for much the same reasons. When will they ever learn?