Re-read with post-high school reading comprehension. Emphasis added to help you out. Here’s a vocab lesson: word meanings change over time. “Regulate” in the century the Constitution was written meant to “make regular” not to fix interest rates, something Congress is not doing; it’s being done by a quasi-private bank.

Guess it was an easy step to forget the limitation of the words “to coin” and to expand on the words “to regulate.”

The people complaining about low interest rates are all your typical entitled bond holders crying in their beer about their reduced income stream of interest payments for their risk free investment. Boo hoo.

The US Treasury Bonds ARE the printing press. Issuing bonds is how money gets made, and when a surplus is run, money is extracted from the private economy anpermanently destroyed.

China and Europe and the Arabs must buy bonds because they run a trade surplus with us. If they want to stop buying bonds, they have to stop selling us so much stuff, or buy more stuff from us. There is no alternative. The dollars keep pouring in, and they have nothing better to do with them than park them in Trasuries.

China and Europe also buy bonds to get dollars to buy oil and airplanes, which are only sold in dollars.

I think probably more than a year, but that depends upon whether Europe comes to their senses and how much risk some are willing to stomach. And depending on tariffs, trade disputes and US coming to their senses, REMs too – maybe a Moore’s Law there too, if only as a hedge against CHN cornering that market.

DS

It is risky to those not of the Austrian ideology, but I think commodities are going to show good returns in the next year.

The US bonds are being bought by many folks and institutions in Yurp because their inflation and other instruments are swirling down the bowl in response to their dumb reactions to the downturn. Some of the bank jogs and bank walks went right into the US Fed. Not ss an inflation hedge, but because that’s where the safety is. Hard to make good returns right now, so best not to lose.

DS

2. Most residents would not be able to buy their homes back because they received no money from the eminent domain (as all money would go to the bank) and NOBODY would make home mortgage loans again for a generation, except for extremely bank-favorable terms, as they would fear the government would again step in and rip them off again.

No vacant homes. No management problems for lender. No foreclosures destroying the area.

Owner/tenant hopes to again reclaim ownership at a fair price and so takes care home. A win win solution.

Not everybody. Individuals and central banks (including China’s, which recently overtook India as the world’s biggest source of gold bullion demand) have been buying gold. Look for gold and silver to ignite this week.

US bonds are not an investment; they’re losers to inflation. A five-year with a .70 yield? And safe? Several US cities have announced they’re bankrupt. The fed gov ain’t far behind, but as others here have pointed out, the fed can’t go bankrupt because it has a printing press, so look for lots of losers in the bond market when the rest of the world wakes up to the fact that we can’t repay without significant devaluation, and when interest rates go up, we won’t even be able to service the debt, even with devalued dollars.

Not to say that all bonds will lose. There are some Eastern European five-year bonds yielding almost five percent, and if I had money to invest, I’d be looking outside the dollar as a reserve.

And yes, China’s manufacturing growth has slowed, but it’s still growing. And trinkets? These are trinkets? “[L]arge gas turbines, large pump storage groups, and nuclear power sets, ultra-high voltage direct-current transmission and transformer equipment, complete sets of large metallurgical, fertilizer and petro-chemical equipment, urban light rail transport equipment, and new papermaking and textile machinery. Machinery and transportation equipment have been the mainstay products of Chinese exports”.