{"id":25494,"date":"2017-09-12T06:29:41","date_gmt":"2017-09-12T11:29:41","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=25494"},"modified":"2017-09-30T13:05:05","modified_gmt":"2017-09-30T18:05:05","slug":"in-the-dark","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=25494","title":{"rendered":"In the Dark"},"content":{"rendered":"
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In the Dark<\/a><\/h3>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
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The stock market is zooming this morning on the news that only 5.7 million people in Florida will have to do without air conditioning, hot showers, and Keurig mochachinos at dawn\u2019s early light Monday, Sept 11, 2017. I\u2019m mindful that the news cycle right after a hurricane goes kind of blank for a day or more as dazed and confused citizens venture out to assess the damage. For now, there is very little hard information on the Web waves. Does Key West still exist? Hard to tell. We\u2019ll know more this evening.<\/p>\n

The one-two punch of Harvey and Irma did afford the folks-in-charge of the nation\u2019s affairs a sly opportunity to get rid of that annoying debt ceiling problem. This is the law that established a limit on how much debt the Federal Reserve could \u201cbuy\u201d from the national government. Some of you may be thinking: buy debt<\/em>? Why would anybody want to buy somebody\u2019s debt<\/em>? Well, you see, this is securitized debt, i.e. bonds issued by the US Treasury, which pay interest, and so there is the incentive to buy it. Anyway, there used to \u2014 back in the days when the real interest rate stayed positive after deducting the percent of running inflation. This is where the situation gets interesting.<\/p>\n

The debt ceiling law supposedly set limits on how much bonded debt the government could issue (how much it could borrow) so it wouldn\u2019t go hog wild spending money it didn\u2019t have. Which is exactly what happened despite the debt limit because the \u201cceiling\u201d got raised about a hundred times though the 20th<\/sup> century into the 21st<\/sup> so that the accumulated debt stands around $20 trillion.<\/p>\n

Rational people recognize this $20 trillion for the supernatural scale of obligation it represents, and understand that it will never be paid back, so, what the hell?<\/p>\n

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In the Dark The stock market is zooming this morning on the news that only 5.7 million people in Florida will have to do without air conditioning, hot showers, and Keurig mochachinos at dawn\u2019s early light Monday, Sept 11, 2017. I\u2019m mindful that the news cycle right after a hurricane goes kind of blank for […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2,4],"tags":[14964,195,9735,940,15724,15807,449,1138,827],"class_list":["post-25494","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-economics","category-environment","tag-clusterfuck-nation","tag-debt","tag-debt-ceiling","tag-florida","tag-hurricane-harvey","tag-hurricane-irma","tag-james-howard-kunstler","tag-stock-market","tag-united-states"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25494","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=25494"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25494\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":25495,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25494\/revisions\/25495"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=25494"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=25494"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=25494"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}