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PaperclipPerfector  8mo ago (text post)   33773 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of April 7, 2025

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The short-term benefits of printing money go to American voters, while the costs are pushed onto foreigners who don’t vote

How exactly are the costs of increasing the US money supply borne by foreigners?

Maybe you're implying they are diluted (e.g. via inflation) but most US dollars are held by the US, and so this would mostly hit Americans. Moreover, those US dollars are held by choice -- they can trade them at any moment for Euros or Pounds or CAD or AUD or Yen or even BTC/ETH/DOGE and the price of that transfer represents that. If structural reasons imply that the US is gonna print more money, that's ought to be priced into the USD/EUR exchange rate.

https://www.stlouisfed.org/timely-topics/how-much-u-s-currency-held-abroad-why

Currently, non-U.S. residents hold a little bit over $1 trillion in U.S. currency, and that’s about 45% or almost 45% of the total amount of U.S. currency that’s held.

foreigners holding our currency abroad are essentially making an interest-free loan to the United States …

So currency is like a government bond, but it’s a government bond that pays no interest. So if, for example, an American tourist were to go someplace in the world where U.S. dollars were accepted in exchange for payment for hotel services or restaurant services or some sort of trinkets or souvenirs, then you know if the U.S. tourist shows up in Jamaica and pays some place for souvenirs with U.S. dollars, then the U.S. tourist is getting something of value that is in exchange for little green pieces of paper that cost the United States more or less nothing to make.

Now, if the owner of the souvenir shop in Jamaica just circulates that currency within Jamaica and it stays there forever, then Americans have gotten goods and services of value — souvenirs or tourism services — in exchange for something that costs us more or less nothing. But if, say, in 10 years, somebody in Jamaica decides to take those U.S. dollars and exchange them for U.S. goods and services, then what the United States has done is gotten goods and services for 10 years in exchange for almost nothing, and then 10 years later, we have to pay for them, say, in terms of goods or services or other assets. And so we’ve gotten a 10-year interest-free loan for the amount of the currency that was paid for the original souvenirs.

To that 1T$ of foreign held dollars, you want to add the foreign held portion of the US debt (which totals 36T$), which seems to be 7.9T$. Debt will just turn into freshly printed dollars at some point in the future, so it is kinda similar to holding currency.

Of course, the GDP of the US (in 2023) was 27.7T$, so from my naive point it does not seem to be that big of a deal -- if you owe a third of a year worth of productivity, it hardly seems that you are hopelessly over-debt. It might be that the valuation of the GDP is off by some huge factor (god knows what the worth of a finance firm should be), but then the valuation of the US$ is likely off by a similar factor, so this would not change the ratio all that much, I think. One of the merits of having your debt denominated in your own currency.

Of course, this is just the feel I get from five minutes of googling, so I could be terribly wrong.

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