this post was submitted on 07 Jun 2024
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[–] [email protected] 190 points 5 months ago (6 children)

If you had 34 trillion in debt and a centuries-long history of making on-time payments, you’d have a perfect credit score.

[–] [email protected] 37 points 5 months ago

"Bankers hate him! Get an 850 credit score and dictate the terms and interest rate of your own debt using this one simple trick."

[–] [email protected] 20 points 5 months ago

The US govt basically has a perfect credit score. They have almost infinite payment history and almost infinite available credit.

[–] [email protected] 16 points 5 months ago (1 children)

Don't forget being the only issuer of the currency you get indebted in. If I could get indebted in a currency I create myself, believe me I would

[–] [email protected] 14 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) (4 children)

Articles and posts like this really just exist for conservatives to shout that we need to stop federal spending and cut out "unimportant" things like Dept of Education, as described in Project 2025.

The problem is that debt is good. It enables us to pay for infrastructure projects and services. It doesn't work like a household budget...not on the scale of international economies...because money "in the bank" is money that's not in circulation.

When money is not in circulation, it's not being used to pay for goods and services....it's just...sitting there being hoarded.

You all complain about Musk hoarding a few hundred billions. Imagine if the debt were in the opposite direction and the government had $34T sitting in the bank doing nothing.

And anyone can buy Treasury debt. In fact, last year it was an AMAZING return on investment for anyone that bought into it and holds into the debt for a few years. One of the safest places anybody could put money to earn a return (behind a HYSA at FDIC insured banks).

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[–] [email protected] 12 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) (1 children)

Credit rating also depends on credit to debt ratio. You want to keep it below 35%, so you would need a credit line of $100T or more to have a great rating.

[–] [email protected] 19 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago)

I think sovereign debt would work like an AmEx Platimum with “no fixed limit”, which makes the algorithm ignore utilization.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 5 months ago

Yeah, this is just people not understanding how credit scores work, part #57294, lol

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[–] [email protected] 108 points 5 months ago (6 children)

Are you immortal? Do you have an income vastly higher than the servicing cost of that debt? Do you owe the large a majority of that debt to yourself? Are you able to, if push came to shove, tell your external creditors to go fuck themselves and dare them to so much as try to collect on the debt you don't feel like paying? If you can't answer "yes" to all these questions, you aren't the US and have a debt situation that has absolutely nothing in common with the US debt.

[–] [email protected] 33 points 5 months ago (1 children)

Do not forget that you are also the very entity that hands out the currency you hold your debt in.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 5 months ago (2 children)

It’s like Dwight printing IOUs for Schrutebucks

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[–] [email protected] 46 points 5 months ago (1 children)

Two things:

  • if you owe the bank $34,000, it’s your problem; if you owe the bank $34,000,000,000,000, it’s the bank’s problem.
  • its a big club, and you’re not in it.
[–] [email protected] 8 points 5 months ago (1 children)

That's a lot of zeros, when written like that

[–] [email protected] 12 points 5 months ago

Yes, and it is the correct number of zeros to use. I find it helps to put things into scope. “Trillion” is an abstract magnitude to most people. Writing it out numerically makes it clear how absolutely enormous the number is.

[–] [email protected] 38 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) (1 children)

Worth pointing out that credit scores are completely detached from the government. They are entirely private industry, that is collecting and selling your financial info without your consent or opt in. If you were born before 2004, then they have also accidentally leaked literally all your personal info to the dark web, with literally 0 consequences.

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[–] [email protected] 30 points 5 months ago (13 children)

-1000 social credit for questioning government

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[–] [email protected] 29 points 5 months ago (1 children)

The US has a fantastic credit score. Being the world's reserve currency helps.

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[–] [email protected] 29 points 5 months ago (1 children)

Micro-economics vs. macro-economics

[–] [email protected] 19 points 5 months ago (2 children)

I strongly encourage people who still think like OP to look up what happened the last time we paid off the national debt.

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[–] [email protected] 26 points 5 months ago (6 children)

Well, since the billionaire class doesn't pay it's fair share of the tax burden, that money has to come from somewhere.

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[–] [email protected] 25 points 5 months ago (4 children)

On a serious note. Are there any countries without any national debt? Because if not then clearly capitalism is broken right?

[–] [email protected] 38 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) (7 children)

No, if anything it shows capitalism is working. When you can increase or tighten money supply (ie when you can print and shred money) debt isn’t what you think it is. A state with money issuance powers is not a household.

I can thoroughly recommend “The Deficit Myth” book by Stephanie Kelton, if you wish to understand modern monetary policy better.

Or watch the film Finding the Money: https://youtu.be/3HRgsYSLOYw?si=g_CgqMWtC7oBCkGn

And to answer your specific question, there are countries with very low debt, but that’s usually due to either not being able to “borrow” money (again, borrowing doesn’t always mean what we would think as borrowing when you can issue your own money), being locked to another currency (Denmark is a great example - amazing economy and locked to the euro) or having a large generation of wealth (typically oil). Larger countries can issue debt more easily.

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[–] [email protected] 21 points 5 months ago (10 children)

I'm not the biggest fan of capitalism myself but the existence of debt does not mean it is broken. Debt is a mechanism to allow for solid investments, e.g. building infrastructure or schools that will create a net positive in the (far) future.
Germany for example has enacted a Schuldenbremse (debt-break) in 2009 and forbids our states to take on new debt and limits the debt taken on the federal level to a minisule percentage of the GDP. Our infrastructure is currently slowly but noticeably crumbling away, bridges are getting closed for heavy traffic and experts say many of them have become irreparable due to missing maintenance and need to be fully rebuild in a few years. The local military barracks are in such a desolate condition that the soldiers need to drive two towns over to shower. We might not take on financial debt, but an infrastructure debt that will demand an even bigger toll on us.

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[–] [email protected] 23 points 5 months ago (6 children)

have you considered printing your own money?

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[–] [email protected] 21 points 5 months ago (8 children)

Credit scores are just some fake shit that boomers made up. It's so dumb.

[–] [email protected] 39 points 5 months ago (10 children)

...except that it used to be that your ability to secure a loan was based on where you went to school, how firm your handshake was, and if you happened to have the right skin color and sex organs.

The current system certainly isn't perfect; and if you're denied a loan you have a legal right (in the US) to know the reason.

There are systemic issues, to be sure. But the nominal goal is absolutely better than what we used to have.

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[–] [email protected] 19 points 5 months ago (17 children)

Countries can print money. If the debt is denominated in your own currency you will never not be able to pay them.

[–] [email protected] 14 points 5 months ago (8 children)

This.

More people need to understand that the debt of a sovereign nation isn't analogous to that of a household.

Public sector debt is private sector surplus.

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[–] [email protected] 17 points 5 months ago

Tell me you don’t understand how credit score works without telling me you don’t understand how credit score works

[–] [email protected] 16 points 5 months ago

Credit scores require you to get some kind of debt. This is because it's not a score of your financial health. It's a score of how reliably you repay your debt.

[–] [email protected] 14 points 5 months ago

Terry Pratchett's "Making Money" taught me enough economics to know that individual debt and national debt are two different things.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 5 months ago (1 children)

if it makes you feel any better you'd go to prison if you decided to run a ponzi scheme... unless you're a bank, that is

[–] [email protected] 7 points 5 months ago (1 children)

Wait a bank is a Ponzi scheme

[–] [email protected] 11 points 5 months ago (3 children)

Not literally. I bet the poster notices the overlap between ponzi and fractional reserve lending and doesn't care about the differences

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[–] [email protected] 11 points 5 months ago (2 children)

How much does the USA have in assets? I'm willing to bet more than $34,000,000,000,000.00.

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[–] [email protected] 11 points 5 months ago

I wonder how many debt collector calls the Whitehouse gets a day

[–] [email protected] 10 points 5 months ago

I heard that the us still has good credit because although it owes trillions, it is worth quadrillions (all lands and assets), so not really a concern

[–] [email protected] 9 points 5 months ago (1 children)

Whats really neat is that modern credit score systems are only 40-50 years old

[–] [email protected] 9 points 5 months ago

And what's sad are the number of people that act like credit scores are a force of nature we just have to accept

[–] [email protected] 8 points 5 months ago

putting people in debt is how people with already too much money make even more money from people who never had enough

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