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Comment by biggestlou | Hacker News Reader

Did we bail them out before? From what I can tell, we opened up a currency swap using a Treasury fund (not funded by tax dollars) specifically devoted to currency stabilization.

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A currency swap IS a bailout if the swap occurs at a price above what would otherwise be the market clearing price. "currency stabilization" is just a funny way to say "artificially propping up the peso"

> using a Treasury fund (not funded by tax dollars)

tell me, where do you think the Treasury gets its dollars...

It would be kind of ironic if they were printing them.

Nope, it's self financing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exchange_Stabilization_Fund

> The fund began operations in April 1934, under director Archie Lochhead and financed by $2 billion of the $2.8 billion gold surplus the government had realized by devaluing the dollar.

> The ESF can convert SDRs into dollars on its account by issuing certificates against them and selling the certificates to the Federal Reserve,[6] and later repurchase them when it has surplus cash.

So they did actually fund it by printing money.

The ESF is self financing. And yeah, sure, it is artificially propping up the peso, the same way we propped up the Mexican peso, the Thai bhat, and others once upon a time.

If not us tax dollars, how are they funded? Are the backed with full faith of credit of the us government? It’s hard to search for answers on this one.

It's self financing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exchange_Stabilization_Fund

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