It doesn’t mean bad governance doesn’t have a cost, but the US is not at singularly greater risk than the rest of the West.

The US has more to lose than literally everyone else combined, if you add up its total future liabilities, its overseas empire, and its paper tiger of a military. Also, your analysis severely underestimates the reality of financial contagion. The moment that the US starts to flounder, everyone else will too.

This is also why secession will never happen.

Says who? Secession is unthinkable NOW, certainly. But imagine what’s going to happen when the US military no longer has any credibility whatsoever either overseas or at home. The reality is that the US Federal government has beaten the idea of secession out of the minds of most people. But the Union stands only so long as the government at the centre of it all has actual credibility. Remove that credibility, and the currency that backs it, and the military that gives it teeth, and you have everything needed to permit secession across multiple axes of power.

This is even less likely, since $30 Trillion of QE has not caused any aberrant inflation. This level of money-printing no longer causes inflation, and technology is the reason. People with formal economics degrees are not equipped to grasp this.

1) The only reason why you’re not seeing the inflation is because government statistics lie about it. If you track inflation more accurately using older and more heuristically correct methods, you’ll see that inflation has never been below 4% even under the most optimistic of scenarios.

2) Technology is not the only reason why hyperinflation has not kicked in. The major reason is because of massive debt-deflation in personal and corporate balance sheets. Vox Day went over this in his Return of the Great Depression more than 10 years ago. All of the data that I’ve seen support his thesis. The reason why hyperinflation hasn’t really kicked in is simply because the standard monetary transmission mechanism is completely broken.

3) Both Vox and I have formal degrees in economics – I have a joint degree in the subject. And both he and I, and a number of others in similar positions, can see that households are reducing debt and cutting back on expenses, as are corporations, yet government debt is absolutely exploding around the world.

Thanks. That Dish was probably it, because the book was heavily Korean-influenced. “Death’s favorite Warlock” by Charles Dean.

And yeah, Old Gamer. You know, those railroad builder games, stuff like that.

I tried Halo once, but it was literally too many buttons for me to keep track of at one time. Reload, Crouch movement, melee attack, grenades vs. shooting, freelook and zoom… Nope, I sucked, and couldn’t keep interest.

That’s why I literally had no idea that ‘Didact’ was a Halo character. hehe

It doesn’t mean bad governance doesn’t have a cost, but the US is not at singularly greater risk than the rest of the West.

This is also why secession will never happen.

There will be a catastrophic economic crisis, yes, quite possibly followed by hyperinflation of a level that we’ve never, ever seen before

This is even less likely, since $30 Trillion of QE has not caused any aberrant inflation. This level of money-printing no longer causes inflation, and technology is the reason. People with formal economics degrees are not equipped to grasp this.

Read ‘The Price of Tomorrow’ by Jeff Booth. He explains why technology is causing exponential deflation, which offsets the QE for no net inflation.

Huh. Good question. I’ve honestly never ever heard of that reference before. My first instinct is to say that it’s some sort of reference to STARCRAFT, because that word sounds sort of like “Nuke their galbi“, which is a Korean barbecued beef dish. (Very tasty, too.) And South Korea is absolutely mad about STARCRAFT – some of the world’s best competitive players come from there. If you play as the Terrans in that game, you can order nuke strikes against bases.

That’s my very very rough guess and I’m probably dead wrong. I really have no clue exactly where that meme came from.

Also – it’s been a LONG time since anyone brought up Master of Orion 2. The original was a GREAT game and I loved playing it. I never played the second game – something to do with whether it would be ported to Mac at the time or not, as I recall – but I remember watching the trailer for it back in the day and going, “WOW!!!”.

I’m not sure you understand how a debt-default works.

The US has about $170-200T (depending on how you measure it) in future liabilities backed by essentially nothing other than the promise that the US government will pay them off… somehow. That is roughly 7-10 times the entire current GDP of the country. America’s ability to issue debt to cover its payments for various things depends entirely on the idea that the country itself is united under a single government that issues that debt.

Now look at what happened to countries where the federal government collapsed. The USSR, Yugoslavia, and the Austro-Hungarian Empire are good examples. The problem is that we’ve never seen a debt bubble this big in all of human history – it’s never happened before. Even the USSR when it collapsed had only about $160B of debt against an economy with a GDP of roughly $2.2T. Debt default did not cause the USSR’s collapse.

However, after its collapse, the various debts of the USSR were distributed throughout the constituent republics of the corpse. And most of those refused to pay their bondholders. Russia has since taken on the burden of paying off almost all of that debt.

Can you imagine, say, Texas agreeing to shoulder Clownipornia’s debt once the US government finally disintegrates? I can’t either.

I also never claimed that the economy will go to zero. It won’t. There will be a catastrophic economic crisis, yes, quite possibly followed by hyperinflation of a level that we’ve never, ever seen before – worse than Hungary’s in the 1920s. But it’s hard to say for certain because the normal transmission mechanism of money into the economy appears to have broken down since 2008.

It will be years, maybe decades, before the new republics within the USA recover. But the economic collapse of the current USA is absolutely certain – this is beyond mathematical doubt.

Now consider what happens to the rest of the world when the US debt bubble finally implodes. Do you see that a major part of the reason why China has prospered for as long as it has is because it can finance its expansion with cheap money? China deliberately manipulates its currency to sit far below its true worth by buying dollar-denominated debt and boosting its foreign currency reserves so that it can keep its interest rates low. This also allows the US government to keep the printing presses running and generate gargantuan amounts of funny money.

What happens when China can no longer sell its goods cheaply to the USA, at all, because the US currency is worthless? China in turn will collapse because their entire economy is built on a massive lie too. So will Japan’s. So will the rest of Southeast Asia, though the regional economies are much stronger since the AFC in 1997. The entire world will go through a depression like nothing we’ve ever seen.

Basically imagine what Russia went through in the 1990s, amplified many times over, on a global scale, and you’ve probably got a mild taste of it.

Nope.

Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and other countries similar to the US have per capita GDPs that are only slightly lower than the US, despite none of their currencies being the world’s reserve currency.

They also have welfare states.

So worst-case, America’s prosperity converges to the level of those three, which is a less than 20% decline.

They are also ‘debt-based societies’.

Yes, the stupid military-based Pax will go away, as it should. 80% of Americans think it is a waste. America can and should return to a pre-1941 foreign policy. It has no need for troops or bases in the other hemisphere at all, since it no longer needs oil from there, and does not need those troops to conduct trade with its major trade partners.

But the notion that a country with majority-white (indeed, Western European) demographics would plunge to ‘zero’, briefly falling to the level of true shitholes like SS Africa or India, is absurd. Again, none out of Canada, Australia, New Zealand, the UK, etc. have the ‘world’s reserve currency’.

I figure you are much more of a recent gamer than I am (I mostly just play indies and very old games like quake orMoo2) and in one book the important family name was ‘Nukedeagalbi’. The author made much of the name talking about how it was an old gaming Joke that nobody understood, and kept cracking jokes about it throughout the whole book like the reader was supposed to get it… But I don’t.

Web-fu reveals nothing, and you are the closest thing I know to a recent games expert, I wondered if maybe you could shed some light on it?

Sorry for being OT but this is driving me nuts :).

‘Secession’ is only suggested by people who know far less about this, than they think, and think that ‘a state’ is the smallest divisible unit of land in the US.

I’m well aware of the fact that states are not the lowest-level political entities in the USA. I said as much a week ago and have been writing similar things for over a year, ever since LTC Kratman himself pointed out that fact to me a long time back. The breaking will not be along state lines, it will be far more messy and bloody than that.

The only area where I differ with LTC Kratman is in his assertion that the USA will survive as a single political entity. I do not agree. I’ve seen enough of “American” culture during my time there to know that the USA is at least three, and maybe as many as five, different nations contained in one geographical footprint.

The breakup, when it happens, will be much more along the lines of Balkan fratricide or the Spanish Civil War than the War Between the States.

Even if America’s per capita prosperity declined by 20%, it would still be more prosperous than the UK, over 5 times more prosperous than Mexico, and a full 25 times more prosperous than your country, India.

And that is where YOU are wrong.

The USA’s entire economy is debt-based, and its continued existence rests on the fact that the US dollar is the world’s reserve currency. Once the illusion of a “United” States of America is finally shattered for good, what do you suppose will happen to that currency?

There is only one possible answer: it will become worthless.

The drop in per capita GDP won’t be 20% at that point. You’re looking at a scenario more like that of the collapse of the Soviet Union, except vastly more violent. The entire economy will be wiped out and a hard reset will be required – which means, among other things, that Social Security and Medicare will be annihilated.

Can you imagine what will happen to American living standards when so many Americans, who depend on Social Security and other welfare programs simply to survive, no longer have the ability to eat?

Moreover, can you imagine what will happen to the American overseas empire when its military is finally exposed as the $700B paper tiger that it really is, in an actual confrontation with a real enemy that can fight back – like China?

America will certainly recover, eventually. Nations living in a territory as rich in natural resources and human ingenuity as that will not stay down for long. But it will not be the same USA that gave rise to the Pax Americana.

i) The division is not ‘red states’ and ‘blue states’. That is not granular enough, and a state that was 48% red is not any different from one that is 52% red. Only 38 of 50 states voted for the same party in all elections 2000-present. At least 12 states qualify as purple.

ii) Rather, the division has to be either across a) counties, or b) house seats.

Which means, a map like this :
https://www.270towin.com/2020-house-election/8M4pm1M.png

Or this :
https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/proxy/MkrWYPC8PfPZOupyNn7dhhWac2zWidXnWUg-8H-DKYXFDyJZ0rPpjSveg7LzWlP4OdKAo8P_VdCZyU1x3Gb9TjiKYy7jEyI0cnAfp13I_-eBb4NDPj91X1cKYxcS

Now, when seeing this allocation, the reasons that secession cannot happen become obvious :

i) ALL the metro areas are blue.
ii) The blue areas are not contiguous
iii) The red portion comprises 80% of all land, and controls 99% of all food production and natural resources.
iv) White leftists don’t want to be in a country that is just 30% white and 28% black. No matter what they say, they don’t want this.

‘Secession’ is only suggested by people who know far less about this, than they think, and think that ‘a state’ is the smallest divisible unit of land in the US.

It has to do instead with the inescapable FACT that the USA will self-destruct in the next ten years or so. At this point it’s simply inevitable.

Again, false.

Even if America’s per capita prosperity declined by 20%, it would still be more prosperous than the UK, over 5 times more prosperous than Mexico, and a full 25 times more prosperous than your country, India.