There's a little over $200 billion dollars left in the US treasury right now, we have higher debt-to-GDP than Greece did at the beginning of their sovereign debt crisis, AND we have persistent high inflation. Something has to give. You can't fight inflation and pursue monetary easing at the same time.

The us debt is denominated in usd. Countries in the EU don’t have the same luxury.

You're proposing to print away the debt during a period of already high inflation. While you're technically correct that we can avoid default by printing more money, the practical consequences of monetizing the national debt right now, would be catastrophic hyperinflation.

  > we can avoid default by printing more money

isnt "printing" usually done through issuing bonds?

do those increase inflation?

The treasury takes on debt when it issues bonds, but the Federal Reserve expands the money supply when it buys those bonds. It's a two-step process.

> You’re proposing to print away the debt during a period of already high inflation.

Current inflation isn’t that high (YoY is still high because its trailing), and if there is a recession, it will naturally fall faster, and easy money is the natural policy in those conditions, independent of debt concerns (which monetary policy generally is, that’s kind of the point of an independent central bank.)

Greece's debt-to-GDP ratio never stopped climbing; it peaked at over 200% in 2020. The crisis, meanwhile, was short-lived as the ratio per se was not among the most salient factors.

Greece crisis is short-lived? Greece never recovered from the crisis.

Employment in Greece in 2010: 4.6 million.

Employment in Greece now: around 4.0 million.

Sure the unemployment rate has gone "down". That's because the youth gave up and simply moved from Greece. The GDP per capita will improve because of that but their GDP in constant prices never recovered (and is around 2002-2004 levels).

The crisis itself pertained to bond defaults, and in particular the reverberations through the international financial system. But the extra context you've provided only drives home my point: facial nominal figure comparisons are worthless.

Geece had to massively increase taxes and implement austerity programs, to say nothing of the EU bailout. Since then, they've been able to survive on low interest rates. Low interest rates which are now gone, as the world is busy fighting inflation.

Inflation cuts both ways, eviscerating older debt. That's the whole reason for the present banking crisis. In any event, the debt-to-GDP ratio being higher than Greece's at the time of its debt crisis says absolutely nothing by itself about the U.S. situation. Pointing it out is a baseless, cheap insinuation.

Except it's not, because our interest rates are also in the same range as when their debt crisis began. Greece was fine at those debt levels until their bond yields hit 5%, at which point they entered into a self-reinforcing spiral of insolvency. The Federal Reserve is currently targeting interest rates above 5% to fight inflation.

Fed can just print another 20 trillions. Treasury can mint a special 10T USD coin to payback FED. Nothing needs to give. As long as people have "faith" in USD, the music will continue...but those damn Yuan and Rubbles. Taht we need ro launch another Iraq war with China and Russia. They have WMD that we can blame on and get our boys there with poker cards - a version for the Russian and a version for the Chinese. Surely we can beat them as easily as Iraqis? Ignore Afghan - we always intended to replace Talebans with Talebans while we wash 10T USD for congress money laundry.

i lost brain cells reading this

This is the first time the US gets challenged on multiple fronts from multiple actors. China, Russia and non-alignment members are all challenging the status quo. The US dollar is being challenged from multiple fronts and one of them is Crypto. (though also the fact it's being mismanaged by its own creators is not helping either).

We are definitively in an interesting time. More interesting than the cold war era? I don't know but we shall see.

> This is the first time the US gets challenged on multiple fronts from multiple actors.

Its not even the first time since the end of the Cold War.

> The US dollar is being challenged from multiple fronts and one of them is Crypto. (though also the fact it’s being mismanaged by its own creators is not helping either).

So, I’m just about a half-century old, and since I became politically aware – which was pretty young – I’ve been hearing that exact line (except with something else, usually “Gold”, in place of crypto until recently) continuously that entire time.

>This is the first time the US gets challenged on multiple fronts from multiple actors

Laughs in WWII

> This is the first time the US gets challenged on multiple fronts from multiple actors. China, Russia and non-alignment members are all challenging the status quo.

Two blocs are emerging. One is largely unified around shared cultural interests in resilient democracy and defence of human rights. The other is a hodge-podge of malcontents, allies-of-convenience and one strong but largely regional power (i.e. China).

If we look at this as a political struggle then we have to look at the problem-solution ledger to see who holds the advantage.

The US (and the West) have issues with an imbalance of power and wealth, and growing numbers of disillusioned, young voters - this is the problem statement. What is the solution that the non-aligned movement can offer? Worse inequality? Fewer rights? What?

The non-aligned countries have fractuous political bases and are shoring up their systems by cracking down on dissedents, attacking neighbours and attempting to corrupt other nation's foreign policies. No one is lining up to migrate to these countries, no one is holding them up as a beacon of rightousness (outside of the wingnut extremes, of course).

Contrast this to the Cold War. The Soviets held a significant sway over the "International Left". They had answers to the problems of the West. Not good answers, but good enough to sway a lot of students and intelligentsia.

China has no allies of note. Russia is a basket case. The rest of the non-aligned bloc are essentially local dictators trying to keep the pin in their respective grenades. All of them are experiencing the same struggle of either a rapidly aging population with no migration, or a rapidly growing youth who want a better life. For example, China's median age is rising 6 months for every year that passes, and they are a long way from being a sustainable, powerful economy.

These are interesting times in the political sense but unless the West starts kicking a lot of "own goals" - which is very possible but not exactly probable - then the US (and to a lesser extent the EU) will own this century as well.

> The US (and the West) have issues with an imbalance of power and wealth, and growing numbers of disillusioned, young voters - this is the problem statement. What is the solution that the non-aligned movement can offer? Worse inequality? Fewer rights? What?

The problem is that with modern politics and all its tools, logical (proposed) solutions aren't needed. Éric Zemmour, multiple times found guilty of stoking racism on TV, got 2.5 million votes/7% of the presidential vote in France on a platform that basically consisted of "France is no longer France, let's ship everyone of foreign descent to where they come from, ban Muslims, rename every person with a foreign name, screw the EU". If you think about it for more than a few seconds, that's just terrible on multiple levels and would ruin the country alongside millions of lives. Yet 2.5 million agreed with him? Yeah, he was heavily sponsored by a shithead billionaire, but still. Similarly with Le Pen, who got 8 million for 23%, had a vague populist "foreigner's fault, EU's fault, we'll give money to the poor to subsidise fuel consumption, etc." platform, while literally being bankrolled by Russia (multiple favourable loans from banks close to Putin and friends which saved her party).

Brexit was merely the first major "Western" own goal. We'll see also how climate change changes the field.

> The problem is that with modern politics and all its tools, logical (proposed) solutions aren't needed. Éric Zemmour, multiple times found guilty of stoking racism on TV, got 2.5 million votes/7% of the presidential vote in France on a platform that basically consisted of "France is no longer France, let's ship everyone of foreign descent to where they come from, ban Muslims, rename every person with a foreign name, screw the EU".

In other Western countries it is not uncommon for 7-10+% of the vote to go toward extreme right-wing parties. This is not the death knell of Democracy. 10% of the vote is a long way from winning government.

The problem for would-be dictators who are trying to usurp the West's governments is that, once things get tough under their leadership, the population turns against them very quickly. Take the Tories in the UK - if an election were to be held today they would likely become only the third largest party in the UK lower house. Similarly the conservative Coalition in Australia; they were trounced in both state and federal elections after their competence and corruption became clear.

The West takes some hits from time to time. It's strength is in its ability to recover.

Notably, for much of the Cold War, Soviet propaganda was such that many in the West were either unsure whether the Soviet communist experiment was working, or genuinely believed it was—including those on the political right.

The excesses and failures of the system (and the degree to which its "communism" was nothing but authoritarianism draped in a red flag) were not always clear until well after the fact.

Contrast that with today, where we may not have a perfect window into China, but we can certainly see a lot of what's going on there, including reprehensible things like the Uighur genocide, and the degree to which China's "communism" is heavily colored by capitalism on the one hand, and authoritarianism on the other.