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by angrycontrarian 1360 days ago
Primarily because that scenario ignores the realities of hyperinflation. Default is bad, but hyperinflation destroys nations.
3 comments

Hyperinflation is not on the table for the scale of money printing required to continue paying foreign owned debts.
Do you have a source to back up that claim?
China has a bit less than a trillion dollars in US debt, down about $100B over the past year and expected to shrink. If the US can't source a trillion dollars something has gone very wrong.
Where's the citation that printing away the debt won't cause inflation? I can't find it in your post.
I'm asking you to use your brain and critical reasoning skills buddy.

Also

> won't cause inflation

won't cause HYPERinflation

Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. The claim that printing away 127% debt-to-GDP won't lead to hyperinflation is very extraordinary, and yet you still haven't posted evidence from an authoritative source.
More specifically, I don't know of an exception to the rule that sustained hyperinflation and economic decay go together.
Hyperinflation happens only when you've already got economic decay -- in fact, economic collapse. Hyperinflation is the symptom, not the cause.

Hyperinflation isn't numbers like 10% annual inflation, which are extreme events in functioning economies. Some definitions put it at more like 10,000%. That's not caused by central bank manipulation. That's caused by a complete collapse of the economy. The central bank can try to deal with that by printing almost-valueless currency as an IOU, but that's the result, not the cause.

That's often caused by war, though it's sometimes caused by massive mismanagement of resources. It's not really relevant to the kinds of situations being discussed in the article, which are functioning economies (as long as they can keep from going to war on each other).

defaulting is worse than inflation. It means some people get 0 - whereas inflation spreads the pain.

Source: Argentina.