5 ms·
Never say never. That they have been too big to fail is currently a fact. Historically, monarch bonds which are a precursor to government bonds have defaulted.
by AstralStorm 8y ago
Never say never. That they have been too big to fail is currently a fact.
Historically, monarch bonds which are a precursor to government bonds have defaulted. As have bonds of weak countries in severe crisis. (Argentina comes to mind.)
It is a last resort of course.
None of the countries you mentioned, not even China, are economically independent. Thus when one falls, the others will feel it. Monetary policy alone won't work if you have to combat huge inflation or deflation, it has been shown in past crises. (Especially US ones.)
- stephen_g 8y agoNo, actually never. The key words being ‘non-convertible currency’ (i.e. no longer having the artificial limitations of gold standard) and ‘in their own currency’. For example, my country’s federal Government can never run out of Australian dollars (we own the central bank!). But if I remember correctly, Argentina has a great deal of debt (like a lot of developing countries) denominated in foreign currencies. They can absolutely be forced to default on that. The Eurozone basically all use a currency they can’t control, so have similar problems if they don’t have a big enough trade surplus to compensate (like Germany does). Those problems were predicted from the very earliest days of a common currency being discussed, like by the great economist Wynne Godley in 1992 (London Review of Books, November issue if I recall). He wrote a great textbook on monetary economics in 2006 with Mark Lavoie which discusses this kind of thing. Inflation and deflation are a different issue, but can both be better controlled through fiscal measures (The monetarists’ fantasy that you can control everything just with interest rates is definitely wrong. It’s way too blunt a tool for the job).