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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: i-node who wrote (488847)	6/19/2009 8:15:48 AM
From: Taro	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 1574006

Node, I forwarded your post to my buddy Bob, who came up with the comments below, Taro "I'd like to see the answers to these questions from the other side. Trouble sets in when the ENTIRE national budget has to be paid out in interest to service the debt. That is when the nation has to collapse. The politicians' answer to this is inflation - pay the debt off with currency that has become almost totally devalued; on paper the debt is paid but the value to the lender is near zero. So lenders stop lending when they see the possibility of this kind of thing developing. That it is why I expect inflation in the future - inflation from all countries with fiat currencies. It's the way to cheat your way out of debt. And there are MANY such countries - far more than the number of countries that use gold to back their currencies. Nixon took the USA off the gold standard back about 1970/71, and for this very reason - a sharply rising debt problem. After the devaluation, the situation was saved by getting the Arabs to sell oil only in dollars, which produced a large demand for dollars, and kept the fiat currency stable. But can it last now? I doubt it. Not in the face of borrowing TRILLIONS from Asia, the Arabs, etc. I have read that nearly half the US debt is now owed to foreigners, and they cannot be stupid enough to continue loaning as usual when they know they could be literally giving the money (buying power) away for free. BTW -The latest issue of Scentific American has a good article about what they call grassoline - fuel made from "waste" plant material, rather than corn. They think it can solve at least half of the USA's need for portable fuels. If true, it is a hugely significant development on the oil-problem front. Probably a good thing to invest in. But I think US natural gas is ripe for investment also; it's the only readily available (cheap) fuel which can substitute for gasoline - its price stays pretty much down while gasoline and oil go higher and higher lately. And we "waste" large amounts of it generating electricity (which should be done with nukes instead, so the nat gas can be saved as a portable fuel for cars and trucks). Bob