Economic model lol: Argentina has defaulted, what, nine times since 1816?

 Frontrunner threatening to upend economic model...

Oh yeah. That would be horrible.

Nine-time debt defaulter Argentina (not shown hehe) . . . AND Al Roker, wow!

 

Trump-admiring libertarian's surprise primary win upends Argentina...

LOL, National Review reports AOC expels protesters at her own townhall in Queens, characteristically buried on the Friday night of the summer's first big holiday weekend to minimize such things

 

‘American Citizens before Migrants’: Protesters Heckle AOC at NYC Town Hall

Brittany BernsteinMay 27, 2023 11:06 AM

Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D., N.Y.) speaks at a U.S. House Financial Services Committee hearing on Capitol Hill in Washington, D.C., December 13, 2022. (Sarah Silbiger/Reuters)none

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Protesters booed and heckled Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez at a town hall she held in Queens, N.Y., on Friday night.

A man holding small American flags approached the progressive “Squad” member and shouted, “American citizens before migrants.”

“Where are you on the migrant issue? You’re a piece of s***,” he added.

Ocasio-Cortez said, “OK,” as the man was escorted off.

New York governor Kathy Hochul (D.) declared a state of emergency in New York after the expiration of Title 42 earlier this month. The state has roughly 60,000 asylum seekers relying on social services. New York City has gotten so overwhelmed with the influx of migrants that the city has begun sending them to the suburbs. Hochul said she is “looking at all state assets to help ameliorate the problem that is at a crisis level here in the City of New York,” which could includes housing migrants at SUNY campuses, closed psychiatric centers, large parks and parking lots.

Protesters at the town hall held signs concerning a number of issues: “America First. Vetted legal migrants only,” “Stop funding Ukraine,” “AOC: An Obvious Criminal,” and “AOC: Stop pushing drag queen story hour,”

More protesters came forward throughout the evening, including a woman who was critical of Ocasio-Cortez’s support for U.S. funding in Ukraine. The New York Democrat voted to send $40 billion in military and humanitarian aid to Ukraine last year.

“Stop funding this war, there’s a lot of communities that need help and need that money,” another woman said as she was removed from the event.

Ocasio-Cortez was met with both boos and cheers from the crowd when she suggested the Biden administration should abolish the debt limit, as a June 5 debt default deadline looms.

“$100 billion for Ukraine that you voted for!” one man shouted in response to Ocasio-Cortez’s comments on the debt ceiling.

The progressive lawmaker said earlier this week that the “stakes of a default cannot be understated.”

“The chaos that would ensue and the impact on people’s everyday lives would likely be immediate and it is one of the reasons why we need to take default off the table,” she said.

Send a tip to the news team at NR.

 

 

The Dingbat meant overstated, not understated.

Here come the Chinese industrial bankruptcies: Officials to respond with a mixture of capitalism and Keynes

The Chinese premier's comments are discussed here in The UK Guardian:

Premier Li Keqiang told lenders to China's private sector factories they should expect debt defaults as the world's second largest economy encounters "serious challenges" in the year ahead. ... Li's warning followed the failure of Shanghai Chaori Solar Energy to make a payment on a 1bn yuan (£118m) bond last week. The default was the first of its kind for China and widely seen as pointing to the end of 11th-hour government bailouts for troubled enterprises. Some analysts said the decision to let some indebted firms collapse was a sign the authorities had learned from the Japanese boom and bust experience of the late 1980s and early 1990s. Tokyo was plunged into two "lost" decades of stagnation after it prevented zombie companies from declaring bankruptcy – even blocking petitions from bondholders in the courts - when a property collapse exposed debts many times the value of their businesses.

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If only we could get Americans to practice some similar capitalism by letting companies and banks fail instead of bailing them out.

China can afford the Keynesian stimulus, however, unlike the US. They've got the savings Keynes prescribed, in the form of massive foreign reserves.

Too bad America has no such savings.

Why Money Market Funds Are Especially At Risk If The Government Defaults

the one-month T-bill settled at .27 after spiking to .32

Money market funds invest in ultra short term securities like T-bills with average maturities under 60 days. These came under pressure yesterday, as reported here:

The one-month U.S. Treasury bill yield spiked to a multiyear high on Tuesday amid mounting concerns that the U.S. may not fulfill its payment obligations to short-term bond holders. The yield on the one-month T-bill traded as high as 0.322 percent, levels not seen since the fourth quarter of 2008, before settling at 0.273 percent, according to data from Thomson Reuters. The yield stood at 0.083 at the start of the month. ... 

"If the U.S. was to default, T-bills are under real threat of not being paid... and the risk premium in the bond yields is reflective of that fear," said Evan Lucas, market strategist at IG. A large portion of demand for T-bills comes from institutional investors, such as money market funds. "Ten-year bonds [by comparison] are relatively unaffected by the shutdown and debt ceiling as coupon payments will flow over the life of the instrument and one or two missed coupons can be recuperated," he added.

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To put the fear in perspective, a 2-year Treasury yields only 0.373% this morning, so the spike in the one-month to 0.322% shows how seriously the bond market can react to the prospect of debt default.

Obama Wants A Debt Default To Discredit His Opposition?

So suggests JT Young, who makes a plausible, although strictly political argument, here, for why Obama might want a debt default:

[T]he last time Obama faced Congressional Republicans in a debt limit fight, he lost enormously. ... However the roots of the administration's non-negotiating stance may run deeper than just that last defeat. It is not just a repeat of the past it must avoid, but a continuation of the present. ... Obamacare is hardly the worst of the administration's PR problems. According to a Bloomberg News national poll released 9/25, Obama's approval rating on the economy is negative, with 38% approving to 56% disapproving. On the federal deficit, it is -32% (29% to 61%). On the recent Syria sidetrack, his rating is 31% - 53%. ... It is clear that nothing the administration wants is likely to move over the next three years. Historically, the president's party generally loses seats in midterm elections - particularly second midterms - so the president's legislative situation is only likely to worsen. Should it do so, the president's political fortunes and popularity are sure to follow. In sum, there appears to be no variable that will change the chessboard. ... [T]he president's only hope appears to stake everything on a single move. In this case, it appears the move is to goad Congressional Republicans into a dramatic loss in a high-profile - and ideally prolonged - budget battle. That means a shutdown or worse, default, to discredit his opposition - in his best case scenario, to such an extent that he reverses the trend of normal midterm losses and the rapid decline of second term presidents' political relevancy. With his second term initiatives dead early, fighting a continuous rearguard action on his signature achievement, anticipating the loss of additional Congressional seats, and with lame duck status just over a year away, the White House may see little to lose by betting large. If so, America could find itself with quite a lot to lose, as this budget fight gets nastier, longer, and more dangerous than anyone anticipated.

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But what if the non-negotiating stance is more than just political in the conventional sense? What if it's ideological in a more sinister way? What if Obama really means to transform the country not just by eliminating Republicans, who are the political representatives of the middle class, but by eliminating the middle class itself? And capitalism in the process? And using the crisis of a default to install himself permanently at the head of the government? Using the impressive means now at his disposal with surveillance capabilities, militarized police who care nothing for the Fourth Amendment as we saw in the Tsarnaev affair, drones, the Department of Homeland Security generally, and the TSA in particular to control travel? And a de-Christianized, paganized military loyal to the commander in chief?

As all students of communist revolution know, it is the middle class which is the greatest enemy of the communists because being more numerous than the upper class the middle class stands in the way of the revolutionaries' attacks on the rich and on private property as a concept. "Their special interests are absolutely incompatible with the economic disturbances which are the inevitable accompaniment of transitional periods. The disturbance of credit cuts the ground from under their feet. They begin shouting for order, for the strengthening of credit, in such a way that every concession to them leads in effect to a complete restoration of the old order", wrote Bela Kun in 1918.

Make no mistake. This has been a transitional period in the mind of Obama, who is trying to transform the country in a number of ways which are not in keeping with America's past. For example, despite growing public opposition since March 2010, Obama continues to insist that ObamaCare must be implemented even though he himself has underscored its unpopularity by unilaterally and unlawfully altering and delaying key features of it. The Supreme Court itself has validated its compulsory basis, which the regime constantly trots out as authoritative as any teaching bearing Pontifical imprimatur. But at what cost to the middle class whose numbers continue to shrink? The best estimates show that ObamaCare will force 16 million heretofore middle class Americans into Medicaid, the healthcare system for the country's poor which already has 70 million participants, dramatically reducing their numbers by transforming their condition to dependency on the government. Fully 93% of American wage earners already make less than $100,000 a year, and 75% bring home less than $50,000 annually. Between the two extremes lie barely 30 million people. This week's posterchild for ObamaCare, for example, was a law student who got cheaper healthcare through Healthcare.gov, ObamaCare's new web portal which just opened, because it shunted him into Medicaid because his income is too low to qualify for a subsidized ObamaCare compliant health insurance plan. This was widely viewed as a positive!

The truth is Obama has done nothing to help the middle class even though he claims to be their champion, just as the Affordable Care Act will neither provide care nor be affordable. In fact, one might say Obama has been exacting revenge on the middle class. Even though he's been in charge of the government going on five years, Obama has done nothing to improve middle class incomes, which have instead headed in the other direction under his watch. Annual household income has been reduced by over 5% since June 2009 alone.

Similarly the hallmark of middle class membership, the home ownership rate has been reversed to the 1996 level after 5 million homes have been repossessed by the banks. During Obama's tenure in office the ranks of those not in the labor force have soared above the 90 million mark as the longest unemployment recession in the post-war period appears to have no end in sight nearly 6 years since it began, driving college graduates back home with their parents and dramatically reducing family formation. The credit expansion of the post-war economy upon which home ownership was based has hit a brick wall since 2007 while the powers that be have claimed to fix it while enriching only the bankers and the richest investors. Total credit market debt outstanding is up less than $8 trillion in the interim when by all rights it should be up $25 trillion. We even have so-called right wingers who both applaud this decline of home ownership and enthusiastically agitate for the elimination of the home mortgage interest deduction. They are as much useful idiots to Obama's pinched leftist vision as have been Republican free-traders who helped the investor class get rich by shipping American jobs to cheaper labor markets abroad, gutting American exceptionalism long before Obama came along.

As if all that isn't bad enough, unprecedented financial repression of the savings of the middle class is the official policy of Obama's Federal Reserve through Zero Interest Rate Policy and Quantitative Easing, arresting the basis of the gains which customarily accrue over time from compounding and destroying the incomes of the already retired.

Its main sources of wealth in employment and earning power, housing and savings already severely punished under Obama, the middle class is just an inch away from losing it all in a debt default. And once they are out of the way, there will be nothing standing between Obama and finally spreading the wealth around of the 2-3 million at the top who hold it.