Comment by tumba | Hacker News Reader

Comment by tumba | Hacker News Reader

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I agree the future is hard to predict, but I don’t know about your claim the US engages in similar trickery.

Economic statistics for the US with fully disclosed methodologies are readily available. US military spending in 2016 was 3.3% of GPD, according to the World Bank. [1] New York’s economy is more industrially diverse than average (ranked 17 out of 51) with Long Island as the most diverse county in the state. [2] I realize that fed report is out of date, but as of 2016, the NY Metro area itself had a GDP of nearly $1.7 trillion, making it one of the larger economies in the world. [3]

[1] https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/MS.MIL.XPND.GD.ZS?end=2...

[2] https://www.newyorkfed.org/medialibrary/media/research/regio...

[3] https://www.bea.gov/newsreleases/regional/gdp_metro/gdp_metr...

> I agree the future is hard to predict, but I don’t know about your claim the US engages in similar trickery.

The US clearly engages in the sort of behaviour that was described as trickery. The state is massively indebted and piling on huge deficits each year, and the only thing that keeps lenders lending money is this belief that the US will always repay its debt. Meanwhile the US deficit is used as a never ending source of free money created out of thin air that's injected into the economy, thus contributing to artificially inflate the volume of money being exchanged (i.e., the GDP)

The New York economic situation is much worse than 2002, an didn’t the far from the rest of the country. The state and local government now gets like 30-40% of revenue from financial services.

If you compare the economy of 1967 to 2017, it’s more telling for NYC. Upstate is even more dramatic. The economy in central/western NY imploded.

The trickery is around the massive debt and the use of the dollar as a reserve currency. 100 dollar bills represent 80% of currency in circulation are like the equivalent of beaver bonds overseas.

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