467
America is ‘going broke slowly’ says J.P. Morgan, as national debt balloons and tariff revenue looks shaky
(uk.finance.yahoo.com)
this post was submitted on 14 Oct 2025
467 points (98.5% liked)
News
32776 readers
3103 users here now
Welcome to the News community!
Rules:
1. Be civil
Attack the argument, not the person. No racism/sexism/bigotry. Good faith argumentation only. This includes accusing another user of being a bot or paid actor. Trolling is uncivil and is grounds for removal and/or a community ban. Do not respond to rule-breaking content; report it and move on.
2. All posts should contain a source (url) that is as reliable and unbiased as possible and must only contain one link.
Obvious right or left wing sources will be removed at the mods discretion. Supporting links can be added in comments or posted seperately but not to the post body.
3. No bots, spam or self-promotion.
Only approved bots, which follow the guidelines for bots set by the instance, are allowed.
4. Post titles should be the same as the article used as source.
Posts which titles don’t match the source won’t be removed, but the autoMod will notify you, and if your title misrepresents the original article, the post will be deleted. If the site changed their headline, the bot might still contact you, just ignore it, we won’t delete your post.
5. Only recent news is allowed.
Posts must be news from the most recent 30 days.
6. All posts must be news articles.
No opinion pieces, Listicles, editorials or celebrity gossip is allowed. All posts will be judged on a case-by-case basis.
7. No duplicate posts.
If a source you used was already posted by someone else, the autoMod will leave a message. Please remove your post if the autoMod is correct. If the post that matches your post is very old, we refer you to rule 5.
8. Misinformation is prohibited.
Misinformation / propaganda is strictly prohibited. Any comment or post containing or linking to misinformation will be removed. If you feel that your post has been removed in error, credible sources must be provided.
9. No link shorteners.
The auto mod will contact you if a link shortener is detected, please delete your post if they are right.
10. Don't copy entire article in your post body
For copyright reasons, you are not allowed to copy an entire article into your post body. This is an instance wide rule, that is strictly enforced in this community.
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
The government cannot "simply print money". In order to add new currency, the government sells bonds to the reserve banks. Future debt is exchanged for money to spend now. If the banks do not loan money to the government by buying the bonds, new money cannot be printed.
The accumulated bond debt is the national debt.
Tax income is used to make payments on the national debt (to pay off bonds which have reached their maturity period). You can also participate in this system by purchasing government bonds, it is not exclusive to banks.
If the government fails to make payment on the bond debt, then the government's credibility drops and banks may choose not to buy new bonds, which immediately devalues the currency.
Functionally, the value of currency is based on faith that the government issuing the currency is solvent and will be able to make payments on its bonds in the future. Tax income is necessary to ensure that the government is solvent.
None of that has anything to do with Trump's asinine tariffs, of course.
I'm pretty confident that selling bonds is not the only mechanism by which the government has access to money. Selling bonds is a common way for cities and states to raise funds, but I'm pretty sure the federal government can just .. fund stuff.
No, of course the government has other sources of revenue. That's not what I said.
Bonds are the mechanism by which the government issues new money. They cannot "print money" without selling the equivalent value in bonds.
I knew that's what you meant but I don't think that's true. They choose not to because there's concerns about inflation and devaluing the dollar, but there's no constitutional restriction on that. The necessary and proper clause is pretty broad, as is Article I, Section 8, Clause 1.
I'm not a lawyer though