Nah those aren't really their problems

main issue is the state owner entities and the zombie companies, which forces them to avoid transparency, plus they are just totalitarian in general

Oh they are...but they are long-term problems that don't hit them till ages down the road.

your a) is a complete non-issue for japan

They already solved that issue 20 years ago with automation and they are comfortable running massive deficits until their population shrinks

I was describing early on...Japan has laid off that.

It was never a mistake for them to begin with, Japan's main issue was trying to aviod deflating their bubbles in the 80s

China right now is funding zombie construction.

Some of it is strategic, fall back positions in case of war, some of it is cronyism

Meaning cities that no one will live in, and economically unviable transport.

See the charts I clipped in that other channel as well

the ghost cities are military fall back positions

they are sometimes dumb, but not that dumb. decoy and fall back positions is at the heart of chinese military thinking

I like when folks talk about the glittery high speed trains in China, that run on a massive deficit and are losing money, not to mention have shoddy safety records.

china's investment in their deep water southern ports was massive part of that spending, which is why hong kong has slipped so far down on shipping numbers

the deficits aren't anything, china is capturing capex due to the capital controls and they are a communsit country so they dont really care about losing money + that video clip

look at where hong was and where it is now in terms of global shipping, that was a big part of that spending

China has just so many inefficiencies in their economy that are state driven, that the US could take advantage of...it it finally cut out it's own govt spending issues and ran a surplus one day.

nah my dude, it doesnt work that way

we can't run gov surplus

Lol. Not for many decades at this point...the debt is too high.

gov surplus would cause massive depression unless private debt exploded by tens of trillions per year

absolutely not

national debt is a non issue, there is nothing to it, it's just a bookkeeping device

You couldn't run a surplus for ages away....but then the China-US competition is going to run deep into the future.

your heart is in the right place but you really don't know what you are talking about

gov surplus isn't like a household surplus we can always pay usd denominated debt

macro isn't just micro scaled up

I know that it is a long-term thing, you have to pay off over a long period of time as to not cause issues. 😛

the us even pretending to run surpluses is what causes most of our problem, it lead directly to offshoring everything to china

no, you dont have to pay it off at all, that's not the purpose of the national debt

I used to live in New Zealand, which purposely doesn't pay off the debt, as to not mess up the economy, even though it could probably pay it off outright.

no country using a modern fiat currency can pay off their national debt, it's literally impossible

Well yep.

that's not a bad thing, that's just a feature of monetary economy as opposed to commodity based barter economy

Though you can still keep it to a low level.

What is low as a percentage varies by country.

no real need to do that either

it's a non issue, really depends on unspent national income and how much employment you want

The US would really have to mess up to end up like Greece of course.

completely different situation, greece is part of a monetary union with other states, they cant devalue or use monetary policy at all