Saturday, February 14, 2009

Stimulus relies on a worldwide Ponzi scheme

"As we have debated how much money to borrow and spend in hopes of jump-starting our economy, we’ve ignored the worldwide stimulus binge. China, Europe and Japan are all spending hundreds of billions of dollars they don’t have in hopes of speeding up their economies, too. That means the very countries we have relied on to buy our bonds, notably China and Japan, are now putting their own bonds on the global credit markets.

American Treasury bonds have been selling briskly on the global credit markets because they have been the calm in the storm of the global credit crisis. This has allowed advocates of borrow-and-spend to argue that for the United States, borrowing is uniquely cheap. But what happens when there is an excess supply of bonds on the worldwide markets? The cost of borrowing will rise. Today we fear deflation, but eventually our fears will turn to inflation."

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/14/opinion/14ryan.html?_r=3&ref=opinion

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