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Comment by wazoox | Hacker News Reader

Nobody's ditching the dollar. However Saudi Arabia and China significantly reduced their investment in US bonds lately. Also notice that the interests on US debt come dangerously close to the whole of US discretionary government revenue.

"May you live in interesting times" as the (apocryphal) Chinese malediction says.

edit : added missing "discretionary". My mistake (you know, a simple honest error, not a "lie" or whatever).

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==Also notice that the interests on US debt come dangerously close to the whole of US government revenue.==

This is not true. Revenue was $4.44 trillion in 2023 [0] and debt interest was $650 billion [1].

[0] https://fiscaldata.treasury.gov/americas-finance-guide/gover...

[1] https://www.crfb.org/blogs/2023-interest-costs-reach-659-bil...

> Nobody's ditching the dollar. However Saudi Arabia and China significantly reduced their investment in US bonds lately. Also notice that the interests on US debt come dangerously close to the whole of US government revenue.

Revenue for 2023 was $4.4T[0], debt servicing cost was $624B. This year it's projected to be in the ~800s.

[0]: https://www.statista.com/statistics/216928/us-government-rev....

I'll bite - how much of this 4.4T revenue is non discretionary spending and how much is the discretionary? Because I think that roughly 25% of USG income was discretionary. Which is quite close to the 800 figure.

Does the debt servicing include repaying the principal of maturing treasuries or just the interest? I haven’t been able to figure out if the principal is not counted in these numbers because it is getting refinanced by rolling over to new treasuries.

If so, it’s like continuously rolling over an Interest Only loan and taking more and more out over time to refinance the ballooning principal.

It's both, although an extremely low percentage of people, IIRC, actually "cash out", most just roll the funds into a new bond once the previous one matures.

So you mean 800B includes the principal repayment?

As far as I know, only the interest is considered as an expense. The principal is not accounted but I might be corrected.

It does, but like I said most people just automatically buy new bonds, instead of actually removing the money from the Government.

Discretionary government revenue, is a subset of that total gross revenue.

> Saudi Arabia and China significantly reduced their investment in US bonds lately

They’re both massively deficit spending.

Why do people lie about trivially disprovable things?

Because you never make mistakes or misremember, I suppose? How graceful of you.

> Also notice that the interests on US debt come dangerously close to the whole of US government revenue.

That is no where close to true, interest on debt last year was 985b, tax revenue was 3.29t

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