[mdorazio]

Cynically, this means the rest of the world is doing that much worse that the US, for all its issues, is seen as a safe haven for parking your money. Alternatively, there's more capital floating around than there are reasonably safe investment vehicles with better ROI than US treasuries.

[Taniwha]

I think the US continues to be buoyed by it's reserve currency status, if say oil started to be priced in euros the US might find itself with a currency like everyone else's and giant debts, the dollar would crash (which would be good for US exports)

[mdorazio]

The US gets a lot of flak for its high debt dollar amount, but realistically the more important metric is debt to GDP ratio, which is a decent indicator of a country's ability to sustain its debt. The US is somewhere around 105% currently, right around the same level as Belgium. For comparison, Japan is almost 250% - basically leveraged to its gills - but tends not to get the same level of bad press. The US should certainly be trying to lower that ratio, but we're still pretty far from Greece-level of crisis.

In actuality, if the US's reserve currency status went away it might be a good thing for our debt since the dollar value on forex would drop and exports would increase. It would also be easier for the US to inflate its way out of crisis in comparison to today.

[Taniwha]

While it's not Japan its debt to GDP is still really really high compared with the rest of the world

https://www.theinvestorspodcast.com/blog/visualizing-the-sno...

(as I pointed out abive I agree that it would be good for exports)