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PaperclipPerfector  3mo ago (text post)   30095 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of August 12, 2024

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The trouble with inflating away excessive social security payments means you're also inflating away debt repayments ... and maybe you can gaslight grandma into thinking she's getting a fair deal, but you're not going to pull one over on quants managing trillions of dollars of investments.

That's a feature not a bug. And quants won't be able to stop it. Here's why.

  1. The Federal Reserve owns a decent chunk of the debt. They don't care if it gets inflated away. In fact, they prefer it.

  2. We just had an episode of inflation in which the debt got inflated away. Bond holders took a bath. Debt/GDP declined from 130% in 2020 to 122% today, despite near-record deficits: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/gfdegdq188S

  3. Many institutions are required to hold T-bills. They will have no choice but to accept a soaking.

  4. As recently as 2022, investors were loaning money to Germany at negative interest rates. Not all investors are rational.

  5. It's possible that private investors will simply stop buying debt entirely and the Federal Reserve will take it all. This is exactly what has already happened in Japan. MMT will sneak in through the back door.

I am not claiming that this process will not come with significant disruptions, but it's the only way to avoid default.

Unfortunately, a world where we're comfortable paying for things by printing dollars is not healthy either. Congressmen lose all sense of scale that is created by forcing oneself to compare to revenue taken in and get used to printing more money. We don't want to be Argentina (or take your pick of reckless country).

Regarding 3, will that result in black market or foreign institutions trying to do the same things without the T-bills?

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