The Debts of a Nation

Dedicated to presenting finance and economics news in plain English.

Saturday, September 6, 2008

Fannie and Freddie are back in the news again with a bailout this weekend. It looks like the CBO figures given in mid-July were criminally low.

In Debt We Trust: The Debts of a Nation is a modern revision of "The Wealth of Nations" by Adam Smith. Smith structured his arguments as a critique against the prevailing economic and political ideology of his time - mercantilism. Under mercantilism European colonial powers amassed enormous amounts of gold and silver wealth through strict control of exports and the wholesale looting of foreign shores. Their colonists were locked in a cycle of indebtedness with financiers in their home countries. Fast forward to the modern age. Not much has changed - except instead of specie wealth we have fiat based currencies based on overleveraged borrowing. Mercantilist trade imbalances still exist. Citizens continue to live under debt bondage. But this time, emerging markets are the ones financing trade imbalances through savings gluts. The next few years will be a time of unknown risks surfacing. The majority of market pundits continue to operate under the assumption that all known risks have been contained. They still believe that the system's parameters can sufficiently contain the world's credit problems. They still continue to believe in the debts of a nation.

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