No, you can show the key facts, with links back to the articles.
If you can’t be bothered to do that, there’s no reason why I should click through to even find out how long or short the linked material is.
You’re the guy who wants to win the argument without actually having to make an argument. I’m the guy who won’t play along. Nice to have met you, but the experience has worn a bit thin.
S&P to GOP (to the tune of the Toreador March from Bizet’s Carmen):
Please keep your bull outside the china shop,
no bulls allowed, that’s where they stop.
When the china breaks, someone must pay,
so keep your bull away!
Lyrics by Richard (“Beethoven’s Wig”) Perlmutter.
Of course it is. It’s all the fault of the people you don’t like. :rolleyes:
Win an agument? There’s nothing to “win” - but perhaps that’s the problem… If you’re too lazy to click and see the confirmation of Japan debt holding in the articles, fine. You can ask Chinaguy for different cites and quibble pointlessly with him.
Aye, that seems to be his MO: dismiss out of hand what he wants to, and then assert that he’s right about things without actually saying anything.
A bit thin, indeed.
My god what whinging on.
From a one page article evidently some folks are too precious to click and read, 2nd para:
3rd Para
Bit thin is the complaining and muttering.
No dismissing out of hand, just plain old basic knowledge. All to be had with one simple click.
You are obviously trying to convince Bo and anyone who agrees with him that the movie was a hijack. You have a position you want someone else to adopt, and making statements to that goal. Such a statement is an argument, and the action is called trying to win an argument.
So if you aren’t making an argument, then your statements are completely meaningless and and everyone is justified in ignoring them.
And if you are making an argument, it’s unconvincing because you refuse to do any work. I can just as easily plug something into google and get a few sites.
I’m not in any way addressing the useless bloody movie. I made a side obs re Japan (tangential, 100% unrelated to whining about movies), gave cites. I also note Chinaguy - an actual specialist as I recall in Bonds - said the same thing. Now, I have saved them the enormous labour of simply looking at the sources (the original request) and confirmed what I said as a side obs. The preciousness of argumentation here and “winning” really can be quite astounding.
But I do see I forgot to relink to article for the quotes, an inadvertent omission.
Yep, this is all silly. People are dumping US bonds to such an extent that investors are currently willing to buy 5 year bonds at negative rates of interest because for some reason they think that they’re a good investment compared to private sector debt/equities even though they’ll be losing money over the five year period.
Go and look at inflation-ptotected bonds (TIPS) yields as well to see the spread between them and treasuries. The spread shows you what the market, actual investors believe will be excess inflation (over the standard 2.5% target) over the next 30 years. Yeah.
Except to again address it and deride it as “useless”, even tho you have yet to show one instance of information in the movie that was factually incorrect. :rolleyes:
Quite, that is why I asked for where his data was coming from - although you should say negative real rates of interest so as not to confuse.
Snowboarding person: move on, you’re boring me. The useless bloody movie is not relevant to this and the entire bloody Japn thing has fuck all to do with it.
Talking about Japan though, this is an actual recent advert placed by the actual Japanese treasury for Japanese bonds :
Photo and Travel Tips | Tinypic" target=“_blank”><img src=“http://i55.tinypic.com/jql5ax.png” border=“0” alt=“Image and video hosting by TinyPic”></a>
http://i55.tinypic.com/jql5ax.png
One of those should work. Makes me want to buy Japanese bonds. 
Another idle though: if US Govt Bonds become less than AAA rated, doesn’t that almost inherently mean that every other debt instrument becomes lower-rated as well?
That is, if the “gold standard” becomes increasingly risky you either need a new “gold standard” (which, what would that be?) or you have merely raised the floor on risk.
Hey, some people are too precious to copy and paste a simple sentence from their link. :rolleyes:
Now, the mechanism, please, by which the 93% of domestic purchasers of Japanese debt don’t want the S&P-influenced lower price that the 7% of foreign purchasers are able to get, because they won’t pay more on account of believing S&P rather than their own lying eyes.
Let’s say the Japanese government has 1-million yen 1-year notes at 2% back in 2002, and are able to sell 93% of the notes that they need domestically at par. But in the world market, people believe S&P rather than their own assessments of the Japanese government, so they want closer to 4% before they’ll take the plunge on Japanese debt: they’ll buy those notes for 980,000 yen, or not at all.
Two things can happen: either the Japanese domestic buyers buy up the rest of the debt at par, good citizens that they are, or the outsiders get their price. But you’re not saying that Japanese domestic investors bought 100% of the debt, so that’s out.
But if the outsiders get their price, you have to explain why the Japanese investors don’t start saying that they, too, want to pay only 980,000 yen for those notes.
Because if they do get that price, then S&P drove up the interest rates of Japanese bonds. But that didn’t happen either.
What we’re left with is that S&P didn’t affect the price that furriners were willing to pay for Japanese debt (my claim), or that the price that furriners could get didn’t affect what domestic investors would pay, even though they knew they could get a better deal if they insisted (must be assumed implausible until shown otherwise).
Yeah mate, just too precious. You asked for sources, givne.
as for the questions about how the Jpn soveriegn bond market operates (or bond markets), ask CG in a GQ thread. He’s the old Bond man. I don’t see any point playing the argument game with you.
Again with deriding the film. I’m boring you? Too bad. Cite some reason for the film being “useless” (as you’ve twice now derided it) or cite some facts the film was in error about.
Matt Koppenheffer understands why S&P’s involvement in the recent crash is relevant to many people:
[
](Standard & Poor's Lowers the Boom on the U.S. | The Motley Fool)
As the film touches on, it seems less-than-impossible that the ratings agencies were compromised and that to some degree they colluded with the people doing the trading (and lobbying for legislation that made what happened “legal”).
In light of that, it seems less-than-impossible that S&P is acting as some sort of agent provocateur or something to force the US to reach a budget deal in haste, rather than simply allowing the legislative process to work itself through. I mean, it’s not like we haven’t seen that scenario taking place recently in other US legislatures, is it?
In a forum called “Great Debates”, you don’t want to debate? :dubious: How… droll. :rolleyes:
The film and the specifics of the Japanese bond market don’t tell us anything about S&P downgrade. for the latter, I believe China Guy was an actual real live operator in this market, so for those with tedious operational inquiries they can ask him. The film is your obsession, boring.
I did miss this item:
Whatever one’s opinion of S&P or Moody ratings (I sense I am a bit more positive on the bond ratings than China Guy), there’s no rational basis to view the S&P note as some “agent provocateur” (queer, I saw the same ridiculous tripe re Greece…). the Note, if one bothers to read it, is pretty clear and has nothing particularly conspiratorial in it. But doubtless conspiracy is more fun.
And if recent history has taught us anything, it’s that unsustainable curves can be maintained forever in the future, so long as they worked in the past…
No one cares about your past ability to pay. They care about the situation NOW and what it says about your ability to repay in the future. The rest of the world is clearly becoming anxious about the U.S.'s fiscal situation - there’s constant ongoing effort to get off the U.S. dollar as the currency of last resort, for example.
This downgrade is exactly the kind of thing that anti-stimulus economists were trying to tell everyone two years ago. Borrowing money at the scale the U.S. is borrowing is dangerous - any potential gains from a stimulus could be wiped out by interest rate increases, skyrocketing debt-servicing costs, and the loss of the U.S.'s ability to borrow at a lower interest rate than it lends.
It’s this last one that I think will be impacted the most by this downgrade. The U.S. has profited from being the most stable currency, because it meant that it could trade on its reputation for value - it could borrow at lower interest rates than it lent. The gap between those two resulted in major financial advantage for the U.S., which helped it to control a large current account deficit and such.
Reckless spending is destroying the U.S.'s reputation for safety. That will most likely translate into higher interest rates for borrowing - if a treasury auction can’t clear because no one wants to buy the debt, then the U.S. has to increase the interest rate payable to entice buyers. Worst-case scenario is that it can no longer find buyers for all the debt, period. In which case the government might try to monetize it by starting another round of ‘Quantitative Easing’ (i.e. printing money to buy up its own debt). This will further devalue the U.S. dollar and eventually lead to an inflationary spiral and even less willingness from 3rd parties to take on future debt.
S&P is warning that the risk of some kind of event like this happening is increasing. Credit crises can sneak up on you and blow up very quickly - it’s not necessarily something you can see coming from a long way off. All you can see is that the risk of some kind of crisis is increasing, and that’s what S&P is warning about. It could happen in two years, or five, or twenty. But so long as the fiscal situation is on an unsustainable trajectory, it will happen at some point.
