Iran is going after America's debt it's targeting the $40T America owes | Hacker News Reader

Iran is going after America's debt it's targeting the $40T America owes

jaymartin.substack.com

32 pointsrobaato11 comments

What impressed me was that the speaker of Iran’s Parliament casually tweeted a tongue-in-cheek variant of a complex economic formula while the president of the US tweeted about being a "STRONG AND SMART (High IQ!) PRESIDENT".

This discussion is entirely stupid from the view of Iran.

What is Iran's situation? Spent money on weapons and spreading terrorism in the Middle East. Spent money to build ballistic missiles and nuclear weapon. What is so special about this country vs North Korea? It has oil.

Now it can't export oil or accessing its money on international state.

Don't bother trying to compare to the USA. We have a different problem. Which country you rather be in? Iran or USA?

I’d rather be in the US, absolutely no question about it.

But does Iran need to suffer less than the USA to win here?

The stakes for Iran and its regime are survival. They’ll suffer a lot of pain if it means staying alive and in power.

The stakes for the US are a lot less than survival, as a nation or as a regime.

Iran doesn’t need to make the US suffer more than Iran can bear. Iran needs to make the US suffer more than the US can bear.

And this is exactly why dependency on single-source energy is anti-sovereign.

What's sovereign? Electricity-only to the home, subsidized battery packs in every home, as much solar as possible everywhere, full-spectrum centralized generation (including gas, oil, solar, wind, nuclear) all decentralized as much as possible, etc.

It's already bad enough that several major economies concede energy reliance to potential adversaries, but when one concedes critical financial controls, well, one is F'd AF. I know Ghalibaf won't get the Nobel for Economics, but he should.

Ghalibaf for Nobel in Economics??? How's about Nobel Prize for keeping a medieval system running in the 21st century?

I wonder how impactful that debt is. If america simply says "no, we wont pay it back, suck it up" there's nothing iran can realistically do. Same for most countries.

The entire world is based on trust and doing what you said you would do, everyone more or less got the memo except trump. The thing with trust is that it takes decades to build and one sentence to break

They could but it'd be the end of the dollar as the exchange medium of choice. With that it would effectively end the USA's position as the economical powerhouse of the world. That in turn would kick down the US economy. That in turn would hamper the USA in maintaining its military presence around the world. That would be the end of the USA as a superpower just like Russia lost its position when the Soviet Union collapsed. It might not be a permanent relegation to the sidelines like the UK experienced but the hiatus would certainly be filled by China, India and possibly some other players.

The article is basically predicting the opposite. USA will become the sole energy supplier (with Venezuela) of the world. All outstanding debts will get paid off due to huge economic windfall. USA will only sell oil in USD so it really doesn’t matter what other oil producers do.

Well, if the USA ever defaults on its debts we'll see what happens. Let's hope it doesn't come that far because even though the article claims the USA will benefit in the short term it won't end well for either them or the rest of the world.

Look at the rate that countries have started transitioning away from fossil fuels this year because of what’s happening in Iran and because of the USA’s growing untrustworthiness. Why in the world would they go back to being dependent on oil, much less dependent on just the USA?

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