Sublime

A combination of President George W. Bush's tax cuts and Obama's post-financial-crash stimulus had, in a decade, taken federal debt from 33% of US national income to 62% in 2010. Unreformed, it was projected to keep rising, to 90% in 2020

In other words, while there is significant foreign demand for dollars (especially to service the aforementioned dollar-denominated debts), there is not a big foreign demand for Treasuries. That’s a key distinction, and that’s what generally happens when the dollar is strong. When the dollar starts rising into a spike, foreigners hold less and less

After the war, John Maynard Keynes predicted countries wrecked by war would go on to have a “craving for social and personal security.” Which is what happened.

For finance to consistently grow as a proportion of GDP, either it is simply upping its take — which might be reasonable within bounds, but raises questions of adequate competition in the sector and of possible regulatory capture — or it is making more and more MBS-like time bombs. It is spinning off flows of toxic financial exposure, of whose valu

In the real world of society and politics, where the displaced have more power than they have in the economy, the reality is that this process can destabilize important and powerful sectors of the economy. That’s what happened throughout the process, but it became a political reality in the middle of the second decade of the twenty-first century. T