A Reddit Refugee. Zero ragrets.

Engineer, permanent pirate, lover of all things mechanical and on wheels

moved here from lemmy.one because there are no active admins on that instance.

  • 4 Posts
  • 268 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: December 22nd, 2023

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  • Sort of wrong metric. It gets weird in China because of the blurred lines between their government and private enterprise.

    China’s official government debt is only 98% of GDP so slightly lower than the US right now and a lot less than the US is projected to be by end of 2026 (125%).
    However China’s total debt, which includes both public-private enterprise (which their government effectively controls), and household debt, is around 330% of GDP. A lot of people use the total debt figure since it makes more sense for their economic structure but it’s not really “right”.

    If we want to take the USA by the same metric, the government debt of 124% pales in comparison to the US total debt of… 719%.
    Except that’s 600% of private enterprise and household/consumer debt which is not really government controlled and does not have a direct impact on the government’s solvency.


  • At some point OPEC will increase supply and the situation in Venezuela will stabilize

    OPEC spare capacity has been a myth for quite some time even when it’s not shut in by transport problems, and Venezuela oil is not suitable for most world refineries and requires a shitton more expensive refining as it is extremely heavy, thick and sour. Neither can realistically make up the Hormuz deficit until infrastructure either bypasses Hormuz, or Venezuela begins domestically refining again, which will likely take 3-5 years with how decayed and sabotaged all their existing infrastructure is right now.

    We are straight up headed for an oil cliff worse than 1973.


  • Where does oil come from for the rest of the world?

    It doesn’t- demand destruction and economic recession is the result.

    Reserves are being drawn at a crazy rate right now to compensate for Hormuz being closed, but that will collapse by the end of June and there will be some huge price spikes and physical shortages. The world economy will need to contract by 5% or more to stop using the oil lost by Hormuz until alternative pipllelines open, supply chains begin de-fossilizing, and alternstive supplies take up the slack with multi year leadtimes.

    Next two years are gonna be really fucking bad.












  • How can they sanction us when global finance still overwhelmingly depends on the dollar though?

    The world has been gradually de-dollarizing for over a decade now. USD held as global currency reserves has fallen from 70% to 40%. BRICS nations are implementing their own payment systems based on the renminbi, and the eurozone obviously can operate independently already.

    A lot of global value is tied up in US investment systems, sure. But a nuke drop would make that value not very valuable anymore. It would suck and the world would be stuck in another great depression, but the rest of the world has plenty of functional financial systems to keep moving on.