Keith Evans
Jul 22, 2017 · 2 min read

Making people better off today can’t happen by Chinese lending Americans money to hit Walmart and buy back the goods they made. No one has the money, and the bargain never really worked in the first place.

While I mostly agree with you assertion that we screwed up big time while we had the upper hand in the world, I have to take exception to this statement. Unless we understand our mistakes, and our successes, we will approach any “fix” from a false perspective and doom it to failure.

The issuer of the currency can not “borrow” its own currency into existence, as the term borrow assumes that the currency exists to begin with. China sells us “real” goods, made with real resources and labor, and we mostly pay for those with pieces of paper that we pull from our collective backsides. Other than delaying the inevitable transition to robotics and AI, this is a bad thing how? The only guarantee they have from us for their dollars is that we will exchange them for more dollars upon demand, as our currency is totally sovereign.

With such a currency and a “debt” denominated in that same currency affordability is never a valid concern, so our problems are all moral, not economic. The Congress of the United States is the sole creator/issuer of the currency and its spending is not constrained by revenues. This means that every choice to deny Americans life sustaining funding is done willfully and with some level of malice toward them. The answer lies in recognizing the malicious nature of this government, not in exporting its dysfunction globally.

    Keith Evans

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    Meandering to a different drummer.