Hacker News Reader

Comment by cm2187 | Hacker News Reader

Unless you are over 50, Between now and your retirement age, the long running story of the greatest accumulation of debt in peace time will likely have come to its conclusion which will invariably be either high inflation or financial collapse. Past performance is not indicative of future results. Some people's savings will get wiped out.

View on HN

I have also read and heard from different financial articles and podcasts that there is no known upper bound to amount of sovereign debt a country can have before keeling over - it is more important that creditors and investors have faith that the government can pay it off, or that the country is good for the money.

However, I tend to agree with your comment. There may be no upper bound to sovereign debt, but economic good times can't last forever, what goes up must come down. And should creditors ever need to collect that debt there must either be high inflation or high taxes, or not pay back loans and risk sanctions.

You might find this interesting. TLDR is that the Fed now owns 40% of T-bills > 5 yrs. In other words, during the big rounds of quantitative easing our government bought a ton of our own debt. It's going to be really nasty unwinding this.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/robertlenzner/2013/11/25/the-fe...

So what is your counter-proposal? Save nothing, spend it all now, and plan on having no retirement?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com