I think you underestimate the US military a lot. The petrodollar or whatever is only powerful because the US is able to protect economic interests with its military power. Last I checked the next best countries are a decade or more and several hundred billion dollars behind. Although, a good argument can me made about internal fighting and political in-fighting and weak stomach of the US voter-base, which can be remedied with the next Iraq/vietnam.

Several parties playing a game. One plays chess, the other Go, and yet another checkers. Long term victory,Long term dominance and permanent superiority or win a lot of short term battles and exhaust your enemy. I don't know who will win but make no mistake this is a war, if not cold then maybe deep-frozen.

Your worldview seems to be from the 1970’s. I do not mean that as an insult; you’re just wildly out of date in terms of understanding modern geopolitics.

The US military today is a bloated, inefficient force sucking up resources that would be better spent elsewhere. They’re funding blimps to watch drug smugglers at the US border, for Christ’s sake.

The populace of the US will not stand for additional military adventurism on the scale of Vietnam or Iraq. Trump started the process of withdrawing from Afghanistan and was lucky that Biden got stuck with the mess Trump made of it. It was forecast to be a broadly popular move and would have been had execution been slightly better handled.

There's no way to "better handle" leaving your corrupt puppet state to fend for itself after decades of fighting the will of the people who wanted a native Islamic government with their cultural values to rule. Americans universally fail to understand how unpopular we are abroad, how awful our low regulation capitalist values are, and how our military is seen as the murder machine that keeps our world-wide bullying going. There was never political will or loyalty in the puppet government or puppet military we built in Afghanistan. The only question was who was going to hold the bag when we finally had to leave.

The only good way to do this was to never invade and conquer but instead to chase ObL and capture him and fight the Taliban only as needed. How Bush got out of any responsibility for his reckless adventurism, not only here but the unforgivable tragedy of endless war crimes and crimes against humanity his Iraq invasion was, is the real tragedy here not Biden's "execution" somehow being sub-par. Per usual Democrats have to clean up after Republicans.

> There's no way to "better handle" leaving your corrupt puppet state to fend for itself after decades of fighting the will of the people who wanted a native Islamic government with their cultural values to rule.

Decimate the country and leave ASAP. Rebuilding and making sure terrorists aren't harbored again is between the people and their new government. Either permanently occupy or leave after decimation. Half assing it like with vietnam will always end in wasted lives and resources.

Hey man, Obama had 8 years to start a pullback. Otherwise I agree though. America probably seemed like a rainbow painted boot stomping on a human face forever.

In every conflict since WWII the US mil won conventional war and it has a better fighting force and weaponry than any country (and bases+carriers+allies). What they lost every time is public support for the war long after dominance and/or invasion has been established.

I mean, look at afghanistan, the war ended in 2004. The US could have declared that country their new territory and every conflict would be domestic terror. They did not need to stay after 04, they stayed to keep the place stable not to defeat the taliban (which militarily, they did).

But can we defend ukraine and taiwan at the same time? Can we afford to?

Why do you think the execution was poor?

> If this isn't handled right, all of us in the US will have to face the consequences of no longer being the world's reserve currency

And this, ladies and gentlemen, is why MMT does not work. Budget constraints are a thing after all, whowouldathunkit.

I don't understand how so many smart people are convinced that MMT makes sense.

They managed to convince themselves via a combination of wishful thinking and basic economic illiteracy - that's all there is to it.

MMT DOES make sense, as long as you are careful to qualify who it's making sense for. If you are a congress person with a very short term time horizon MMT makes a whole bunch of sense. Incidentally, our country is run by congress people with very short term time horizons.

If you are anybody else besides maybe a defense or infrastructure contractor MMT does not make any sense.

This comment is disaster porn for doomers, preppers, and second comers. Being the 2nd largest manufacturer isn't good enough? Having history's most powerful military isn't good enough? Having $63k gdp per capita during a pandemic year isn't good enough?

>You'll look back on the plague years, and remember them as the calm before the storm.

There's zero evidence this will be true. If anything we'll see this as the dawn of chasing fascism out of the country and a rise of class consciousness for workers and what work life means and how wealth disparity hurts us all. I find the doomers of the world fear exactly this and pray for a collapse than see a leftward swing as millennials and gen-z take power from the doomer-friendly ultra-conservatism so many in the USA accept uncritically.

> >You'll look back on the plague years, and remember them as the calm before the storm.

> There's zero evidence this will be true. If anything we'll see this as the dawn of chasing fascism out of the country and a rise of class consciousness for workers...and how wealth disparity hurts us all.

When Russia and China had a "dawn of chasing fascism out of the country and a rise of class consciousness for workers and how wealth disparity hurts us all," that was "the calm before the storm." The storm included GULAG, the Holodomor, the Great Leap Forward, the Cultural Revolution, the greatest famine in human history, decades of economic stagnation, and ultimately civilizational collapse in Russia.

PRC escaped that fate because, after the Cultural Revolution, class consciousness and eliminating wealth disparity went out of fashion, and consequently it went from being one of the world's poorest countries to one of the richest.

When videos of Americans tearing down statues went viral a few years back, lots of Chinese people thought it was hilarious that the Cultural Revolution had come to the US.

The USA is not a totalitarian communist regime. A move leftward for a Democratic capitalist society is modeled on Nordic states, which have the highest outcomes in the world in terms of nearly everything good for humanity. Comparing US liberalism to 1920s communism is highly disingenuous and makes me unable to remotely take your comment seriously.

Ah, the old "socialism with Scandinavian characteristics". Never mind that e.g. Denmark has some of the highest scores in economic freedom, I wonder how some people square that fact with their contention that Denmark proves "socialism works".

There's nothing disingenuous about my comment. Your completely baseless insult to my integrity should not have been posted on this site and will not be forgotten.

The Nordic states are not based on the rise of class consciousness. They are capitalist countries, by some measures among the most capitalist in the world. Nor are they especially based on chasing fascism out of the country, except in the sense that their current governments were established after the Allies chased the Germans out during World War II. (Except Sweden, which remained neutral.) None of them have explicit laws against Holocaust denial, for example, which are typically the first resort for chasing fascists out of the country.

And none of them have in fact chased fascists out of the country. Even though founding fascist parties has been illegal in Finland since they kicked out the Russians in 01944, no Nordic country has banned Sverigedemokraterna (literal Nazis), Bevara Sverige Svenskt (even more literal Nazis), Alternativ för Sverige (expelled from Sverigedemokraterna for being too Nazi), Norsk Front (literal Nazis that became less popular after they started bombing things), Sverigepartiet (intermediate literal Nazis), Vitt Ariskt Motstånd (a literal Nazi criminal gang), Kohti Vapautta! (literal Nazis), Norges Nasjonalsosialistiske Bevegelse (such literal Nazis they actually have "national socialist" in their name), Danmarks Nationalsocialistiske Bevægelse (literal Nazi party sort of going back to the 01930s), Vigrid (literal Nazis), the Norsk Hedensk Front (literal Nazis), Boot Boys (literal Nazi murderers), the Svenskarnas parti (former literal Nazis), the Folkfronten (literal Nazis), the Nationaldemokraterna (arguably Nazis), Nationalsocialistiska Arbetarepartiet/Svensk Socialistisk Samling (the WWII-era Swedish Nazis that drew up lists of local Jews for when the Nazis invaded), Danskernes Parti (literal Nazis), Stram Kurs (Quran-burning party whose objective is genocide against Muslims), Nordisk Styrka (literal Nazi violent criminals), Perussuomalaiset (fascists with 38 seats in the Finnish parliament), Sinimusta Liike (expelled from Perussuomalaiset for being too fascist), Dansk Folkeparti (an anti-Muslim party with 16 seats in the Danish parliament, resulting in Europe's strictest immigration laws), Sinivalkoinen Rintama/Vapauspuolue (ultranationalists), Suomen Kansan Sinivalkoiset/Finlands Folkets Blåvita (ultranationalists now merged into Sinivalkoinen Rintama), Odinin Sotilaat (anti-immigrant vigilante criminals), or the Svensk Hednisk Front (literal Nazis), and only Finland has banned the international Nazi terrorist conspiracy Nordiska Motståndsrörelsen/Pohjoismainen Vastarintaliike (since 02019). Sweden banned the uniform of the Nationalsocialistisk front (who are also literal Nazis, as you might have guessed from the name) but not the actual party.

So if you want to start expelling US citizens from the US because they have shitty politics, well, I know where that road leads, and it isn't modern Nordic states. Governments are the only organizations capable of chasing people out of the country, and by their nature, they aren't actually capable of discriminating against people with shitty politics; the closest they can come is to discriminate against people whose politics conflict with those of the government.

Neither Russia nor China was a totalitarian communist regime before their "dawn of chasing fascism out of the country and a rise of class consciousness for workers and how wealth disparity hurts us all." The totalitarian communist part came later, as a result of that "dawn".

The atom of truth in your farrago of falsehoods is that the Nordic countries have among the lowest economic inequality in the world. To some extent this is a result of economic redistribution policies and the accompanying high tax rates, but to a very great extent it's a result of liberalism, which allows ordinary people to achieve prosperity by working for it.

I don't think this is the risk. The one thing that is very much with in our control is the trade off between inflation and market "health" (price levels).

At the end of the day, we can make any prices on the SP or QQQ nominally sustainable, the lever being the value of the dollar, and when faced with an existential threat to markets and to the dollar, we are going to pull that lever every time.

All in all, I think the dollar will decline slowly as the rest of the world becomes less interested in holding our debt, not in an own goal melt down.

I'm deeply confused, why would the US unwinding QE and raising interest rates do anything but good for the USD?

It's not like there are other countries out there who both have the capacity to be the worlds reserve currency and are financial role models. If the US gets serious about fighting inflation, we might face a recession, but our currency would be very strong.

Let me ask you this, if the world does wish to replace it, what currency will they chose? Really. Look around. Everyone is printing money.

> why would the US unwinding QE and raising interest rates do anything but good for the USD?

On first order effects yes, but first order effects are not the whole story. If this severely blows up markets, it wouldn't matter that we prevented inflation for a few months. The response to that blowup would probably be massive stimulus and therefor future inflation.

> Let me ask you this, if the world does wish to replace it, what currency will they chose? Really. Look around. Everyone is printing money.

A single global reserve currency is far from a fact of history. You could easily argue that whatever the dollar is right now, has never existed before. I don't think Sterling maintained hegemony through anything like petrodollar recycling.

So what currency will they choose? Probably a lot more currencies. Why shouldn't Japan trade oil in Yen. Why shouldn't China trade oil in RMB? Thing have already been moving in this direction for a long time anyway.

No other currency replaces the dollar. A more complicated system is what replaces the dollar.

Probably gold, which was the world's reserve currency from about 00500 BCE until 01971 CE, 51 years ago. Bitcoin would probably work, since its printing is finite and extremely predictable, but politically it's unacceptable to China right now, and it's only 13 years old, so it might collapse in a way that gold probably won't.

> to face the consequences of no longer being the world's reserve currency, and the failure of the petrodollar.

Meh. While it definitely has upsides, it also has a big downside too. It pushes purchasing power of US consumers down.

https://www.phenomenalworld.org/analysis/the-class-politics-...

It makes me wonder: in such a situation, will I be glad I know how to program, or wish I were some sort of infantry medic?

Internet would always exist in a future world with basic hierarchy (that is to say, we didn't go into nuclear winter), your skill would still be in need.

Ask yourself how much a job should pay you to be okay with sanctioned killings. Then think about doing it in a none wartime environment, vs what modern war may look like.

This makes me wish we had competent leaders. Who have meaningful discussion. Who do what they can to avoid wars of both physical and spiritual conflict, by a countries own avarice.

>Ask yourself how much a job should pay you to be okay with sanctioned killings. Then think about doing it in a none wartime environment, vs what modern war may look like.

Can you elaborate? Not sure I follow.

How would we handle this right?

How much of a knife's edge is this, and how do we protect ourselves?

I'm not an economist, a lot of mismanagement and kicking the can down the road is about to unwind. The folks at the top don't seem to realize how thin the veneer of civilization really is. They finally gave in to Roosevelt, and he saved their ass in the 1930s. I doubt this time will prove as lucky.

The standard advice, pay off all debts, have some cash on hand, stock up on food, fuel, toilet paper. Make friends with your neighbors. Have skills that will be in demand, like being able to fix things.

> pay off all debts

Why would you pay off your debt if you thought civilization was going to collapse?

If civilization collapses, 7 billion people will die, at least.

The economy contracting 90% is a possibility, and if your income goes to zero, you don't want to lose what you have left because of a loan you didn't think you'd actually have to pay off.

If the economy contracted 90% you wouldn't have to pay any loans because the loan collectors would be dead. This is sort of like "if you owe the bank a billion dollars the bank has a problem".

Only the unsuccessful ones.

collapse != instant mad max.

Legal claims will very likely still exist. And if you owe money to somebody with more resources or power than you then you're gonna have a bad time.

Look at the USSR in the early 90s for a great example of what that might look like.

Having assets and precious metals, though cliche, wouldn't be bad to have either since they'll at least be worth something even if the USD lost all value.

Gold historically. Bitcoin is arguably in the best position to be the new global reserve currency though, assuming infrastructure doesn't collapse along with the USD.

PRC thinks Bitcoin is the devil, and it's the world's largest manufacturer. I don't think you'll see Bitcoin as the global reserve currency until after Xi and maybe his heir die of old age.