Re: Niall Ferguson bewails US imperial decline
On Sep 13, 2006, at 6:04 PM, Charles Brown wrote:
Could the U.S. creditor nations collect their debt without causing
a big crisis which would impact the creditor nations adversely ?
They couldn’t dump huge quantities of US paper, no, but that’s
unlikely to happen. Debt is rarely ever “collected” - big companies
either roll over their debts and even borrow some more, and countries
just roll over their debts in perpetuity. The more serious problem is
if China or other countries decide they don’t want to lend any more
to the US, or don’t want to lend so much. That would probably require
a pretty deep US recession to balance the foreign accounts. That
sounds like a good historical mission for President Hillary - a self-
imposed structural adjustment program.
Doug