KP
just replying to your original start of thread post.
and an attempt at a transcript of the part of the video regarding Government Debt, I just posted from ABC iview.
We've heard so much about household debt, but shouldn't we be worried about the extraordinary amount of debt, that Governments, particularly the US Government has run up, it's 22 trillion dollars,
Corporate debt is extraordinary. Is this a key risk?
I usually say to people, do you understand that global debt right now is 250 trillion dollars? Do you understand that if you look at the overall value of financial instruments, because global debt does not reflect all the leverage, the number is probably closer to 350 trillion. If you look at unfunded liabilities, just in the US alone there is 47 trillion dollars, forget the other countries, so you are probably looking overall at maybe 500 trillion dollars, against a global economy of call it about 80 trillion.
So we're leveraged about 5 to 10 times. Do you think anybody is ever going to repay that debt?
The whole idea of the modern economy is not repaying debt, but figuring out how do you do a controlled ... default effectively. Everybody's defaulted. But everbody's defaulting in a very gradual scale. And so long as the scale is gradual, and spread out over a long period of time, and as long as defaults occur to some kind of inflation, rather than an outside default, the system can continue to function. In other words new debt, basically replaces the debt that is basically decomposing in front of you, but you don't really know that it's gone away.
So to my mind, if we wanted to have the discussion about whether financializing our economy it was a good idea, we should have had this discussion in the late 80's early 90's, but by now it's too late. That train has left the station a long time ago.
And so, from now on it's not so much worrying about the debt you have but worrying about how do you maintain the perpetual growth machine.Because in the perpetual growth machine, by the way people are demanding, if I were to run in an election on an agenda that people would be better off if the economy shrunk, because, we will all be better off longer term, I will probably not get any votes. So it's not just the politics is demanding, but the people are demanding, perpetual growth machine.
So the question is, how do you continuously feed that perpetual growth machine, to ensure that the defaults are spaced out, and create new debt to replace the debt that is really decomposing as we speak. That's the essence of the policy, rather than worrying how much debt do you have.
Expand
