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John Oliver on the Weirdest Autocrat in the World: Gurbanguly Berdimuhamedov [VIDEO]

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Blind Frog Belly White8/12/2019 4:52:41 pm PDT

re: #252 Anymouse 🌹🎃

Why can’t we? Remember Trump saying he wanted to default on the debt? Does not paying your bills (or not being able to) have the same effect?

Russia doesn’t have to produce a working fleet of these things, they just have to convince chickenhawks in Congress they can, so they spend more money on weapons programs and less on the country as a whole.

Because our debt is all in a currency we print. We could, if we wanted to, print 23 Trillion dollars and pay off all our national debt in one go, and there’s nothing our creditors could do to stop us, or demand other payment.

Other countries, whose debt is denominated in currencies they don’t control, don’t have that option. Let’s say you’re Greece, and you owe $400 Billion, denominated in dollars. You can’t print dollars. You can print a lot of drachmas, maybe, but if you do, the exchange rate would kill you and you’ll never be paid off.

Now, for the US to simply print money to cover the debt would be a TERRIBLY BAD IDEA, because it would devalue our currency, but we could literally make all the debt go away at once. And probably never be able to borrow another dime.