Greenspan: US "Can Pay Any Debt It Has Because We Can Always Print Money"

See for yourself, watch the video...

http://www.realclearpolitics.com/vi...it_has_because_we_can_always_print_money.html

Doesn't Greenspan realize this vvv is what will happen to the USD if they try that?

 

What?! don't you always to be able to back it in gold?
I thought thats what I learned in Gov/Econ

 

You also have to remember that printing more money lowers the value of the dollar. The Federal Reserve shreds billions of dollars each year, I should know because I have mutiple bags and bricks of shreded money.

 

Mexico made this very same mistake years ago, go look up what a peso is worth.

 

whats your point... its $1 to 12... the Japanese Yen is $1 to 77.8 and the Japanese have the 3rd largest economy and a net exporter (unlike the US).

Greenspan is not entirely wrong... it will obviously cause inflation but once the bills are paid then they could essentially pull it back out of the economy... its all about timing and risk. Its never been done with a world reserve currency before so no one REALLY knows what exactly will happen.

btw, the US $ is the world's reserve currency and behaves somewhat differently than other nation's currency

Additionally, a little devaluation of the dollar may be good, since it would make American products cheaper around the world and foreign products more expensive here, thus manufacturing would go up and the US trade deficit would go down. Which equal less chinese made junk on our shores... and more American made junk on China's shores. I mean China has been screwing us with this setup up for years... imagine if we supplied the Chinese market as much as they supply us now... Every single American would have a job and our economy would be booming!

 

Well....hasn't gold gone thru the roof lately? Soooo, all that shit in fort knox went up in value a ton........fire up the presses, pay off our shit, keep going.

 

It is a grey area, but if we print a bunch of money inflation will happen and the gold we have will be worth more us dollars, thus making it easier to pay the debt. Don't think the owner's of our debt are going to allow that manipulation though. China is already having talks about changing the reserve currency because ours is unstable.

 

^ US dollars are not backed by Gold....

 

Our government is actually indebted more to us than china...........

So just who are these lenders? As of last June (the latest complete breakdown available), the biggest holder of Treasury debt was the U.S. government itself, with about 52 percent of the total $8.5 trillion in paper that's out there. Most of the government’s holdings are massive savings accounts for programs like Social Security and Medicare. Just as you may prefer to keep your Individual Retirement Account in the safe Treasury bonds, the folks who manage the Social Security Trust Fund are looking for a secure investment, too.
That’s leaves a little over $4 trillion in public hands. The biggest chunk (about 25 percent of the $8.5 trillion total) is held by foreign governments. Japan tops the list (with $644 billion), followed by China ($350 billion), United Kingdom ($239 billion) and oil exporting countries ($100 billion).

 

I theory that sounds great however I don't see how devaluation of the dollar would cause all that. Any way you look at it, we are not going to produce goods cheaper than China unless the dollar crashes hard and we're in severe economic crisis. If the dollar is worth a little less, you have to pay the workers more so we're still not going to produce things cheaper than the countries we current import from.

 

You've got to remember tho, one of our products lasts 10 times longer than the same knockoff POS made in China........so it evens out. Now, if we could just even the import/export field by making it just as expensive and difficult for other countries to send/sell their shit here as they make it for us to sell our shit there...........and start actually making more stuff here of course.

 

But when it costs 10x as much to make, no one will buy it. There's a reason we import so much from China, we are capable of producing the same things here, but it's too expensive.

 

That's why we need to institute an import tax on subpar quality goods to level the playing field. They can send their quality stuff here to compete on an even playing field and sell their junk to 3rd world developing countries.

 

Doing so is a violation of free trade agreements that nations have with one another. The United States pushed for free trade, and now we have it.

One of effects of free trade was that our products were/are priced too high for the American market- and the global market as well(for many products).

Even if you did institute tariffs on foreign imports, it wouldn't do any good-
The sad truth is that most Americans couldn't afford to only buy American-made products; we need cheap chinese shit because thats all we can afford.

Consider the load of stuff you can buy for a couple hundred dollars at walmart- pots, pans, plates, silverware, basically everything you need for you kitchen. If all that stuff was American made it'd probably cost you 500-600 dollars instead.

 

But if we enforced our immigration laws, made it worthwhile for companies to employ us instead of outsourcing internationally and let the economy run on it's own there'd be more of us working that belong here and we'd be able to afford our own stuff and make imported stuff more expensive like it used to be. I for one would feel better about paying a bit more for stuff made here by people who belong here benefitting companies based here that employ legal citizens here. That is worth more IMO. China needs to find other markets anyway since no one here will be able to afford much from anywhere the way we're headed. They might as well be exporting directly to Mexico instead of here since that's basically what they are doing now anyway & Mexico could send their shit to China instead of here. I know, it's a giganitc klusterphuck that has come home to roost and there is no easy way out but we need to start somewhere.........

 

Immigration is not the US's problem when it comes to producing low-cost goods... Like Tacotabe mentioned, we wanted fair trade, we have it. It's more expensive to produce goods here for a multitude of reasons including as OSHA, QA/QC standards, taxes and higher wages. Chinese companies do not have these overhead items to contend with.

 

Think about this for a second:

You go to the store anditem cost $20.00 and is made in China. The cost to produce that item in China is $5.00. Thats what, 300% profit margin?

If the same product were made in the US, it would probably cost $15.00 to make (due to far higher costs for wages, health insurance, workman's comp insurance, cost of american raw materials, etc.). Now we both know that greedy american corporations are going to want to make as much money as the chinese are, but lets just say they only mark up the item at 100%- your now paying $30 for something that used to cost $20.

Now image that inflated cost of everything you buy- you'd be spending thousands more per year. Now imagine spending thousands more a year when you only make $10-15 dollars an hour, as many americans do.

The american people simply cannot afford American-made products. Sorry.

 

That's it, I'm building a shop in my back yard and never buying anything but raw materials ever again..........I wish, lol. I just hate our country going down the shitter and we just can't do a thing about anything to make anything make sense and work anymore where we can get this shit can turned around. Just sitting around having it slowly crumble and turn into all the shitholes people came here to escape just sucks. Even having a world war won't fix anything because everyone is having the same problem.

 

The problem is free trade... in theory its a good idea... if grants greater access to foreign markets for our companies... however, we've quickly learned that the only American made product that get shipped oversea in a free trade market is American Jobs. Corporations extract the maximum amount of proft as they can... free trade allows Americans to buy more stuff and allows corporations to utilized the trade advantages of poorer (yet skilled) nations. Free trade hurts the American middle class by eliminating jobs... in theory these trade parnters will eventually equalize out with the US leading to more consumers for American companies, unfortunately this seems to be working the opposite direction as planned...while these countries are getting richer they are doing it the expense of the US getting poorer.

The villian here is the American Corporation and victim here is the American worker... the American consumer loves free trade because we can now buy 10x as much stuff but it only applies if you're lucky to have a job.

Fair trade is the only answer... we must only trade with countries that do not have a substantial trade advantage over us (or we have a trade advantage over)... however, the American Corporation and the American Consumer will pay through higher costs and lower profits for the corporation. Its a balance that we must weigh as a nation...

Do we want more stuff and more profit but less jobs or do we want less stuff, less profit, but more jobs?

You know what corporations will say... and they have a bigger vote than the typical American.

To be American is to be a greedy self absorbed proft junky who is willing to screw whoever and whatever in order to make more money. Damn everyone else... show me the money! It is most unfortunate...

 

In Southern California there is a Chinese company that pays up to 2x the $ amount for aluminum cans than California does through it recycling program. They then ship the aluminum to China to have it melted down and shipped back to the USA to sell it. This is because of all of the environmental restrictions, labor agreements etc. that we have put into law in this country. That should tell you a lot about the costs production or just business in general in the USA.