Comments by "D W" (@DW-op7ly) on "Thinkers Forum"
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I usually wait for someone to argue debt is debt
Then I give them this article
👇
Difference Between Internal Debt and External Debt!
The basic character of an internal debt is quite different from that of the external debt. In external debt, at the time of repayment there is a real transfer of resources.
In case of internal debt, however, since it is borrowed from individuals and institutions within the country repayment will constitute only a re-distribution of resources without causing any change in the total resources of the community.
There can, thus, be no direct money burden caused by internal debts since all payments cancel each other out in the aggregate community as a whole. Whatever is taxed from one section of the community servicing the debts is distributed among the bond-holders by way of repayment of loans and interest; and quite often, the tax-payer and the bond-holder may be the same person.
At the most, to the extent that the incomes of tax-payers (in a sense, debtors) are reduced, so will the incomes of creditors/ bond-holders increase, but the aggregate position of the community will, nevertheless, remain the same.
However, internal debt may involve a direct real burden on the community according to the nature of the series of transfer of incomes from tax payers to the public creditors. To the extent the tax-payers and the bond-holders are the same, the distribution of wealth will remain unaltered; hence there will not be any net real burden on the community.
Yourarticlelibrary
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Then when they try and argue how Chinese debt is really Government debt because the banks or corporations are State owned
I give them this article
👇
China's Creative Accounting: How It Buried Its Debt and Forged Ahead with Stimulus
What is China's secret? According to financial commentator Jim Jubak, it may just be "creative accounting" -- the sort of accounting for which Wall Street is notorious, in which debts are swept off the books and turned into "assets." China is able to pull this off because it does not owe its debts to foreign creditors. The banks doing the funding are state-owned, and the state can write off its own debts.
Jubak observes:
China has a history of taking debt off its books and burying it, which should prompt us to poke and prod its numbers. If we go back to the last time China cooked the national books big time, during the Asian currency crisis of 1997, we can get an idea of where its debt might be hidden now.
The majority of bank loans, says Jubak, went to state-owned companies -- about 70% of the total. The collapse of China's export trade following the crisis meant that its banks were suddenly sitting on billions in debts that were clearly never going to be paid. But that was when China's largest banks were trying to raise capital by selling stock in Hong Kong and New York, and no bank could go public with that much bad debt on its books.
The creative solution? The Beijing government set up special-purpose asset management companies for the four largest state-owned banks, the equivalent of the "special purpose vehicles" designed by Wall Street to funnel real estate loans off U.S. bank books. The Chinese entities ultimately bought $287 billion in bad loans from state-owned banks. To pay for the loans, they issued bonds to the banks, on which they paid interest. The state-owned banks thus got $287 billion in toxic debt off their books and turned the bad loans into an income stream from the bonds.
Sound familiar? Wall Street did the same thing in the 2008 bailout, with the U.S. government underwriting the deal. The difference was that China's largest banks were owned by the government, so the government rather than a private banking cartel got the benefit of the arrangement. According to British economist Samah El-Shahat, writing in Al Jazeera in August 2009:
China hasn't allowed its banking sector to become so powerful, so influential, and so big that it can call the shots or highjack the bailout. In simple terms, the government preferred to answer to its people and put their interests first before that of any vested interest or group. And that is why Chinese banks are lending to the people and their businesses in record numbers.
In the US and UK, by contrast:
banks have captured all the money from the taxpayers and the cheap money from quantitative easing from central banks. They are using it to shore up, and clean up their balance sheets rather than lend it to the people. The money has been hijacked by the banks, and our governments are doing absolutely nothing about that. In fact, they have been complicit in allowing this to happen.
HuffPost
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