U.S. Is Bankrupt and We Don't Even Know It
bloomberg.com
bloomberg.com
What is it that makes people think people in US bonds are "asleep"? I certainly don't know whether they are or not, but it seems to go against the almost dogmatic claims you see elsewhere that the market "knows" and already has rational future expectations priced in.
Some people are deeply offended by the fact that America's unique position in the world economy allows it to run an incredible deficit without being punished by the market. The bond vigilantes are just a bogeyman invoked to preserve the illusion of a just world. The reality is that heavily-indebted examples like Japan suggest that the US can probably be mismanaged for decades before real consequences kick in.
Disclaimer: I actually agree with the opinion in this article, but I don't want politics with my tech news.
On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find
interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups.
If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be:
anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.
Please don't submit comments complaining that a
submission is inappropriate for the site. If you think
something is spam or offtopic, flag it by going to its
page and clicking on the "flag" link. (Not all users will
see this; there is a karma threshold.) If you flag
something, please don't also comment that you did.These submissions are getting really tiresome, not least because of the way discussions proceed: the article is submitted, it's silently upvoted by people who agree with it, and everyone who disagrees posts comments explaining why. This was the pattern on the "Why I'm Not Hiring" submission a while ago; nearly every comment explained the many idiotic deficiencies of the article, but it was still a highly upvoted submission because of people who agreed with its substance.
Very annoying.
edit: And now I'm getting silently downvoted too, in the mirror image of the above phenomenon. Excellent.
The current crisis is not cyclical, it's man-made:
http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/12697/64796
Some have seen it coming, ie it could be averted.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2I0QN-FYkpw
Countries have been breaking the basic economic law - income >= spendings - for a long time. There are several ways to get rid of the debt, eg inflation or nationalization. All of them are unethical and are basically stealing from all but a select few at the top. That's what this article is about.
If things come as far as the author writes, it will affect all of us here at Hacker News. There is a lot of people here trying to create something, to enrich the others and thus to get rich. It will all be in vain if our governments decide it's time to rob us.
I could have been less emotional and more specific about this. Thank you for challenging me.
Bloomberg Opinion
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laurence_Kotlikoff
Wikipedia: In Kotlikoff's words, using the deficit as a guide to fiscal policy is like driving in LA with a map of NY. For unlike in our physical world in which we are all using the same language (have the same frame of reference), in the world of economics, we are each free to adopt our own frame of reference -- our own labeling convention. Thus, if Joe wants to claim that the U.S. federal government ran enormous surpluses for the last 50 years, he can simply choose appropriate words to label historic receipts and payments to produce that time series. If Sally wishes to claim the opposite, there are words she can find to "justify" her view of the past stance of fiscal policy. And if Sam wishes to claim that that economy has experienced fluctuations from deficits to surpluses of arbitrary magnitude from year to year, he can do so. Language is extremely flexible. And there is nothing in economic theory that pins down how we discuss economic theory.
The US has many future obligations, which I'd best characterize as "indebted". We can easily meet them if we war a little bit less and tax people like we used to.
What this will take is some think tank getting together and congress listening to them with a KEEN ear. We know our country is under bad circumstances, but with personal greed and politicians thinking that this $200k trip won't do anything in the overall scheme of things is what we need to change. It needs to change fast and with a drastic scale, but when are we actually willing to listen.