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What people thought was their well-defined understanding of government money & debt led to stuff like completely being blindsided by QE not affecting inflation. Monetization, printing the obligations! Or to the japanese bonds widowmaker trades, where people just couldn't believe the interest rate could go down with that much debt. Or indeed, the '90s Italian bonds case where Mosler made his first hedge fund hundreds of millions, taking a free 2% spread by betting against people who thought Italy had default risks for their own currency debt.
Hence the content of my very first post to fcfromssc. If anyone feels like the way the system has been run for over a century is irresponsible and must be leading to unavoidable disaster, let them try to prove that case that we have cause to worry! Let's see the hard-nosed analysis about this supposed disaster, from people who understand the zero-sum nature of financial accounting and who can also properly explain everything else going on now and in history in whatever framework they find illuminating.
Don't sign up politically for a sucker play based on feelings & fear, and don't expect your opponents to do so either. All the evidence shows that economic disaster follows shrinking the debt, while good times follow growing the debt. For those who don't want to learn the plumbing, at least consider going with 'nothing ever happens' and take up the grill pill, for your own sanity. Elon wouldn't have crashed out if he realized the deficit is a tool which would be useful to his own goals of becoming multi-planetary, instead of assuming it's an existential threat because we're 'broke' or something.
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