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I'm not an economist but here's how I see it. Money flows into US treasury bonds, directly. People and corporations literally have direct accounts with the tre
by NTDF9 8y ago
I'm not an economist but here's how I see it.
Money flows into US treasury bonds, directly. People and corporations literally have direct accounts with the treasury.
The US has large fiscal deficits and needs to borrow dollars. The FED set a good interest rate. It's causing owners of dollars to lend money to US Govt in hopes of safe interest gains.
This large deficit happened because of large tax cuts in the first place. Which means, citizens have more dollars in their hands (at the expense of future interest payments). This is driving up spending and thus investment to satisfy that spending.
The yield curve is flattening because of this as more and more people think that long term, the interest payments on today's spending will weigh on economy. Thus, it will ultimately cause FED to lower interest rates. Get in on risk free money while you can.
All of the above is domestic US. Internationally, the dollars that could've helped other countries came back to US in the form of lending. So those countries don't have dollars to invest, causing drops in asset prices and deflation and debt overhang.
- WillPostForFood 8y ago* This large deficit happened because of large tax cuts in the first place.* Tax cuts can't directly cause deficits, only spending can. Spending money you don't have offsetting revenue for causes the deficit. Cutting taxes without cutting spending is a problem. Tax revenue is not down, even with the tax cuts, but spending is growing much more quickly.
- NTDF9 8y ago>> Tax cuts can't directly cause deficits, only spending can. Spending money you don't have offsetting revenue for causes the deficit. Cutting taxes without cutting spending is a problem. Tax revenue is not down, even with the tax cuts, but spending is growing much more quickly. That's a political debate. Economically, an entity needs to have equal inflow and outflow of money to be balanced. The govt needs enough revenue to offset its expenses (a lot of which is interest on debt taken years before, military and entitlements.) If you think about it, generations before partied hard on the credit card with low taxes && still getting social security, medicare etc. Today's generation gets to pick either low taxes or social security/medicare. Tomorrow's generation might not even have the choice.
- JamesBarney 8y ago> Tax cuts can't directly cause deficits, only spending can. This is a very tortured use of the word cause that the rest of the world disagrees with. > Tax revenue is not down We're only now doing taxes for 2018 which was the first year affected by the Tax Act, of course it hasn't changed tax revenue yet.