Random Guy

Mod away. Enjoy being "unable to afford" your Ukraine aid because of the "unsustainable debt burden" for another 50 pages 🤣

What's the collateral for a credit card, @ViperMan? I mean, the owner of the card has a right to an unsecured loan, that's the idea behind unsecured loans. The creditor has rights by law, but there's no collateral? And what about all the leverage buyouts for equity stakes? The 'collateral' is the firm you purchase, but does a bank seize the firm when the shareholders don't pay their debts? What's the bank do with the firm? I get that no one here works in finance, but banks create unsecured credit at every moment of every minute of every day. Saying "banks don't work that way" is incorrect.

What Is a Margin Account? The term margin account refers to a brokerage account in which a trader's broker-dealer lends them cash to purchase stocks or other financial products. The margin account and the securities held within it are used as collateral for the loan.

Framing your disagreement with the Ukraine conflict in money terms ("we can't afford it, the debt/interest is too high, we must raise taxes, etc") is incorrect. The US can always afford anything denominated is dollars (including people, who are paid wages), if those things exist or projects can be implemented to create them. Reallocation of those resources may mean the gov pays above the going rate paid by the private sector, which you experience as inflation. Bonds and taxation are not required--war bonds, for example, are a method to remove the public from competing with the gov for real resources. The cash you would otherwise spend is removed from your account and you get a bond which you can't use to purchase anything. The gov doesn't want your money, it want to stop your spending temporarily. It's a way to drain money from the economy. If you disagree with the conflict, frame your arguments in real terms. You think the conflict is wrong because X, Y or Z. But saying we can't afford it is simply wrong. The implications for all other gov spending on programs and projects, the CBO, everything anyone says about the budget, should be obvious. It's all just politics. Boomers struggle with this, because they lived under a gold standard which no longer exists. Boomers cannot comprehend economic systems without fixed exchange rates. Unfortunately.

The US can buy anything denominated in dollars, and people here are losing their minds over it. If the US wants to give Ukraine trillions of USD to buy stuff on global markets, it can. The US gov can give Ukraine money to buy your car, your house, and your wife! It's just a political choice.

Yes. Do this. Freeze all accounts with all US banks for all foreign nationals and all foreign businesses. End use of the US Dollar by foreigners. Bring the boys home.

Why are you quoting assets in dollar terms for Russians who use Rubles. Do you mean Russian oligarch US assets? You realize you can't take Rubles from Russia, they have their own ledger. That's like saying you want to confiscate the points of a basketball game.

If you have 100m of some currency but there is nothing to buy, why do you want to hold the currency? The gov has infinite money, didn't you listen whe Kashkari said exactly that? He wasn't joking. The game is creating the real resources you want at the time you want them. Money just organizes relationships in a decentralized way to produce those resources.

Seems like a good idea until you realize that most people don't actually know how to run any of those 10 conglomerates. I think Zimbabwe tried this. Better to capture them and keep them for knowledge transfer. If they are dead you can't learn and then improve their processes. See: China.

A bank just created a loan to buy stock. This money is new, written to the bank ledger. It happens every second or so with lots of banks. Lots of new money. Every. Second. When destabilize? Now? Now? 🤣 Seriously dude, when does the sky fall? Cause these banks are pumping out new money every second, and it seems like the currency is not being destabilized. I guess you need to define 'destabilize'? A soccer game is a unique event. There is no duplicate. A widget has lots of duplicates. A dollar created to purchase a widget isn't very similar, unless you want to talk about path dependent research outcomes, for example. Honestly though, I'm not sure where you are trying to go with your analogy. Did you have any blood in your stool?

Everyone understands. You understand that. I understand it. Why is there any discussion of "can we afford it?" or "how do we pay for it"? No one is interested in the change to acceptance of USD, instead people here are b*tching about nominal quantities of USD created by the gov. People don't even bother to think about the nominal quantities of private debt for financial transactions. What's up with this? None of you are in a vacuum, right?

Yeah, what did you want to talk about.

What did you want to dialogue?

Lol what? At what point were we discussing a theory? Lay it out for us.

That counts spending on US purchases for the US as Ukraine aid. IOW, it doubles counts: if I give you an apple, and I buy a pear to replenish my fruit stand, I haven't supported you with 2 pieces of fruit. The footnotes in the CFR piece admit this double counting, just FYI.

Oh FFS lol. If you don't understand that all money is debt just stop posting and go read a book. Taxation cannot be a source for spending, how does one tax something which doesn't exist yet? If you secede from the US to start your own state and create your own new currency, you have to distribute it first before you can tax it. All money balances created are 'deficit spending'. Just do the math dude. I think Helo dude brought up growth. "You" you be "You guys". This place is like a field of mushrooms, everyone is the same. You = y'all. 🤣 I see boiler plate non-speak there, IMO. Yen floats, they can do whatever they want. Depreciation only improves foreign consumption of their output. Ah. Economics is a language, used by the ruling class to justify political decisions. It's like modern Latin. That's it. Everything is everywhere, always, just politics. And everyone on this forum is literally too stupid to get that. This is the problem. Fix that and you fix everything else. Go kill the priests or learn the language. Those are your options.

These guys think that they should stop activity in Ukraine because the US 'cannot afford' to purchase things denominated in dollars. The US gov can buy anything in dollars, whether the choose to borrow first, and give welfare to the already wealthy, or print it directly on the Fed ledger, nothing limits the US govs ability to make purchases in dollar terms except people willing to make things for dollars. That's it. If you want to argue against Ukraine aid, do it in real terms. Your arguments about debt and deficits are nonsense.

All money is a liability on bank balance sheets (that means it debt). The source of money is bank loans, created to fund spending where current bank deposits are less than the planned spending amount (a deficit). If you apply your rule to subtract deficits (the loan) from spending (also the loan) the the result will always be zero. I didn't bring up growth--you did. When was I advocating for housing statistic X or Y? Treasury is not anxious about rates. Where are you getting this? What does Japan eats shit even mean? A .25% change to the floor rate in Japan hasn't led anyone to eat feces, lol. If folks levered in Yen to buy USG debt and that trade unwound that's not eating shit, it's pretty normal for one sided bets to unwind. Honestly not sure if you have any idea what you're talking about. Growth is a measure of spending, that's it. No one is counting actual output, because then someone would be recording all the unpaid labour.

Why is the deficit (debt) bad?

You can go through the data here: https://www.ifw-kiel.de/topics/war-against-ukraine/ukraine-support-tracker/ About 20B is reserve deposits to purchase USD goods or services. The rest is real. You get the difference between real and financial, yeah?

What proportion of that is in-kind transfers?

How was my response a non-answer? Profit share of income rose, margins for some firms increased, but all firms cannot increase margins simultaneously, holding wages constant and maintaining a solvent banking sector. You understand why an aggregate margin calculation wouldn't give you the answer you're looking for?

Growth is a measure of spending, if the gov spends, growth increases by definition. Edit: @HeloDude "GDP, the most popular way to measure economic growth, is calculated by adding up all of the money spent by consumers, businesses, and the government in a given period. The formula is: GDP = consumer spending + business investment + government spending + net exports." I get that most Helo guys aren't sharp, but there's really no excuse here dude. You get this, right?

The flow of money over any period of time accrues to either workers (as wages) or owners (as profits), once it's created by bankers and before it's destroyed by repaying the loans. This is a macro finance truism. Concepts like margins are micro, a practice for accountants. Accounting doesn't hold the same at different levels of aggregation and different time horizons. That's why Mehrling euphemistically refers to it as 'alchemy'. https://www.mckinsey.com/featured-insights/employment-and-growth/a-new-look-at-the-declining-labor-share-of-income-in-the-united-states