Red Pear Luke (BCS) said:
ProgN said:
southernskies said:
Explain like I'm a child… why would t-bills go up to 13%? And why would it be hard to find buyers?
The bond market is an auction market, so when their are no buyers, then prices go down and yields go higher until buyers are interested and buy, locking in higher interest rates.
China, Japan and several other nations are no longer interested in holding our debt because we are at a significant risk of defaulting on our loans. We are $33+ Trillion in debt and still increasing our spending. Debt service now exceeds our defense spending per year and will eclipse it next year, yet we are still spending. The Dollar will collapse and be worthless, so why would nations buy our worthless paper. Our default is all but inevitable and real pain is coming.
Tl;dr: We're ****ed because our politicians (both parties) are financial dumbasses refuse to drastically cut spending.
I think it's probably worth pointing out - if we are screwed, what other countries are going to offer better opportunities?
To me - it's like we are still going to be da belle of da ball. And it's going to be a ****ty ball
Yes, but like you said, it's going to be pain across the board.
The funny thing is, it isn't even that hard to fix our problems. It really isn't, it just isn't popular. Address SS/Medicare/Medicaid, and boom, balanced budget. Everything else is superfluous until those are addressed.
But voters are going to have to feel some more pain before they figure it out. Look how long it has taken Argentina to figure it out. Hell, they just exempted 99% of the country from income taxes and distributed cash to everyone and that candidate is only getting like 30% of the vote. you can't buy the vote forever. But Argentina has been feeling the pain for literally the better part of a century. They thought they had it right in the 90s, but it got away from them again. It's going to have to get a lot worse before it gets better.