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JollyJoker

    
      
Honorable
Undefeatable Hero
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posted April 03, 2025 10:40 AM |
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Salamandre, I have news for you. Capitalism is based on loans. No loan, no growth. Half a century and more ago interest rates were way higher than now. But money has become ever cheaper to get and that has led to more growith - with a different price to pay for that.
The world will definitely not end due to loans and debts.
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Salamandre

     
       
Admirable
Omnipresent Hero
Wog refugee
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posted April 03, 2025 11:02 AM |
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Ghost

 
      
Undefeatable Hero
Therefore I am
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posted April 03, 2025 11:17 AM |
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It doesn't help! It should produce more than 100%, and it remains/stays a small income i.e. profit.. Because paid debt out.. No enough time, but I think that the world lives it with.. The reasons for the brakes on economic growth are war, and others are unknown.. The most important thing is investment, construction, etc. as tax is not enough.. It also depends on the party! Our Finnish Hemp Party invests in hemp..
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Ghost

 
      
Undefeatable Hero
Therefore I am
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posted April 03, 2025 11:24 AM |
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America is an exceptional country, it cannot go bankrupt.. For example, the American depression or whatever it was.. So America prints new banknotes, and pays the debt later.. The only one in the world..
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JollyJoker

    
      
Honorable
Undefeatable Hero
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posted April 03, 2025 12:49 PM |
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Salamandre said: Well, you keep contracting loans, saying this will create growth. Remember me the growth of Germany and France lately and what are predictions for 2025 ?
The trouble with Germany has been - THEY DIDN'T. Germany has a so-called "debt-brake" in the constitution which limits deficit spending which is the reason why Germany is around half as much in debt as France and the USA. But that was an unwise thing to have in the Corona/Ukraine/and-now-Trump situation which was the reason WHY German economy is so lame at the moment: the government needs to put money into the infrastructure and digitalization and for that they need to take money into their hands, which is what they are doing now.
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blizzard

 
  
Known Hero
Urban Legend
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posted April 03, 2025 03:31 PM |
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Ghost said: America is an exceptional country, it cannot go bankrupt.. For example, the American depression or whatever it was.. So America prints new banknotes, and pays the debt later.. The only one in the world..
Anybody can do that. It just means your money is worth crap now
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blizzard

 
  
Known Hero
Urban Legend
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posted April 03, 2025 03:38 PM |
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I like to gang up on individual people, so I'll agree that the doom & gloom from Sal is not realistic. Debts are fine assuming most of it is going into investments. That is the whole point of going into debt, and it is worth the interest and then some.
And the war in Ukraine could absolutely be seen as a worthwhile investment if it was going to solve some sort of security threat. That is seen as less and less the case, since the war is looking more and more like a stalemate. Each side has dug in to make it more difficult and expensive to advance, because it's all about keeping supply lines open and steady. Once the supplies dry up, you are screwed.
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Ghost

 
      
Undefeatable Hero
Therefore I am
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posted April 03, 2025 06:03 PM |
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blizzard said:
Ghost said: America is an exceptional country, it cannot go bankrupt.. For example, the American depression or whatever it was.. So America prints new banknotes, and pays the debt later.. The only one in the world..
Anybody can do that. It just means your money is worth crap now 
Don't joke! It's illegal for us, and we're losing the value of our currency.. Not in America! Because the most important thing is America..
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artu

  
      
Promising
Undefeatable Hero
My BS sensor is tingling again
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posted April 03, 2025 11:11 PM |
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blizzard said: It sure as hell won't be a century of Europe if there's going to be a long term east-west divide again.
That is still TBD. Governments and policies change.
But change of government can determine things only to a degree. Like, no matter who the Sultan was, 19th century wasnt going to shine on the Ottoman Empire. China is coming on huge. They have vast man-power, the technological or civilizational gap no longer exists, not the way it used to be. Communism was totalitarian but it also urbanized and industrialized countries like China and Russia which didnt have the middle-class to do it. (I always thought that was why the revolutions happened in such countries, instead of advanced Europe like Marx predicted. Because the revolution wasnt the inevitable rise of the working class as he believed, but their way of joining the mass production rivalry of industrialism.)
I bought a house in Greece, it’s on rent but this way I can have a Golden Visa and travel in Europe without applying to normal visa. Normal visas are getting much harder to get. Anyway, during handling the paperwork in Athens, almost half, maybe even more than half of the people applying to golden visas beside me were Chinese. I asked the Greek lawyer if it’s always like this and she said yes. So Chinese people are wealthy enough to buy property in Europe now, it’s their middle class on the rise.
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Are you pretty? This is my occasion. - Ghost
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blizzard

 
  
Known Hero
Urban Legend
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posted April 04, 2025 01:16 AM |
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Edited by blizzard at 04:13, 04 Apr 2025.
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If Europe can survive mass fragmentation, it is going to stay dominant and much more attractive than China.
China is in a remarkably similar situation to Japan in the 1970s-1990s (there was actually a point in the early 1980s where some very well-respected US economists were speculating that Japan's GDP would surpass the US, which in retrospect sounds silly). China has remarkable economic growth and a huge middle class, but also remarkably low rates of immigration and a demographic pyramid that is an inverse of what a healthy demographic pyramid is supposed to look like.
What Europe has (and what Sal hates so much) is a lot of fresh blood to keep the demographic pyramid from being horrible. So again, if it doesn't fragment itself into oblivion, the Chinese economy might never at any point ger around to passing the EU, or if it does, it will sink back below. Nativism will also kill the continent, and nativism and fragmentation pretty much go hand in hand, since the emerging political parties champion all of the above, with some exceptions.
As far as housing in Europe, it just depends how long governments tolerate it, because outside buyers will create an ever-growing housing crisis. The recently elected Spanish government is clamping down on this by taxing it heavily with non-nationals, since everybody in the universe wants property in Spain and Spaniards can't get mortages with such low salaries.
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artu

  
      
Promising
Undefeatable Hero
My BS sensor is tingling again
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posted April 04, 2025 08:21 AM |
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Europe can be more attractive to foreigners, that does not determine much. Canada is also a place people love to immigrate, is it a world power? And fragmanted or not, that’s what Europe will probably be like in the mid-term future: a developed, wealthy entity with not so much teeth in the game. It wont be this continent that is a pioneer in everything like it was in the 18th or 19th century. Second half of the 20th century, the determining power was USA, that doesnt seem like it’s going to last very long either, at least not as a single super power.
And a “union” in the true sense of the word, which is something very different than an alliance can not be achieved between USA and Europe because in the long run, they will always have different interests. Whenever there is a crisis, USA’s priority will always be home. This already happened many times. And their political conventions are not very similar either.
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Are you pretty? This is my occasion. - Ghost
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blizzard

 
  
Known Hero
Urban Legend
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posted April 04, 2025 11:32 PM |
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Edited by blizzard at 23:35, 04 Apr 2025.
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Canada is a major power in the W. Hemisphere. It has enough revenue to spare to have a more powerful blue water navy than Russia, as well as far reaching cultural influence. It's a strong opponent of China's one party system, and it is almost certainly going to grow more than China in the next 75 years, since China is an aging hermetic bubble.
Canadians get absorbed into the US because of jobs and intermarriage (a ridiculously large percentage of the population is a short drive to the US border), but not nearly at the rate that they take in new people. It's a growing country, not a dying one.
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