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Strategies & Market Trends : Currencies and the Global Capital Markets

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To: Sam who wrote (2830)	1/4/2001 10:31:07 AM
From: Paul Berliner	Read Replies (2) of 3536

An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. The patient is already very sick. Yesterday's action is no prevention. We can only pray that the medicine is potent enough. As for this line: I think he would agree with Henry (and me, and I would guess you as well) that paying down the debt is more important than his tax cuts. In fact, almost no Republican running for Congress ran with this tax cut as a main issue; if anything, they ran away from it. I am against retiring the debt. I can agree with paying down SOME of it but not most of it and certainly not all of it. I believe I've launched into a rant on this board before about the whole phoniness of this 'paying down the national debt' nonsense. I will reiterate my position, which is as follows: A few words on the Treasury's buyback and its longterm intentions.... Clinton has been trying to woo America with his plan (which even several naive Republicans have embraced) to completely wipe out the national debt within two decades. As we know, the national debt consists primarily of the entire float of U.S. government debt (t-bills/notes/bonds). We're talking several trillion dollars here. So what would the world be like without any U.S. government debt? For one, it is my opinion that the dollar would slowly crash. Foreigners own about half of all U.S. government debt, and their constant purchases are quite important to the dollar's stability and the balance of payments. Japan alone owns over 10% of all U.S. government debt. So, foreign countries would have to look elsewhere for their investment needs, probably to the sovereign debt of EMU countries. Banks and insurance companies would have to finance their ops abroad or buy loads of mortgage and corporate debt, which is not as high in quality as government debt which would mean higher borrowing costs. Lastly the U.S. would lose its position as the center of finance and the dollar would remain weak as countries holding dollars in their reserves switch 'em into Euro and Yen. I am very strongly against this insane idea to retire the national debt for any and all of the above reasons. I see no problem with retiring outstanding high-interest bonds yielding over 12% as issued two decades ago, but I think that if the government ceased issuance of new debt the money markets would grind to a halt and we would become a pedestrian nation, losing our financial center status. To quote Alexander Hamilton, the father of Wall Street and founder of the Bank of New York - "A national debt is a national blessing."

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