O.T. Moody’s Investor Service, might cut the US credit rating

Fake news. Subtract self-induced death and measure apples and apples and the US' life expectancy is doing quite well, thank you.

More of a swamp.

People manage to track tens of thousands of things in orbit. I bet we have a bunch of radar and RF and optical and IR satellites tracking most everything that flies.

Apply some supercomputers. The radar profiles and velocities of planes will be a lot different from birds.

Australia has a semi-secret HF radar array pointing north. The Jindalee Operational Radar Network (JORN) thing.

There were rumors of a Chinese passive RF system that can track stealth aircraft and ships. Just a lot of receive antennas and computers.

But you can stimulate and consume your way out of a recession - which was John Maynard Keynes key insight. Sadly, the more realistic view of investor behaviour this embodies doesn't lend itself to tractable mathematical models.

The tractable mathematical models never modelled the real economy to any useful extent, but they produced the kind of advice that the very rich liked to hear.

Obviously not. The question is doubly satirical - you've tried to satirise Keynesian economics while revealing that you haven't got a clue about it's basic logic.

The math isn't goofy, it just doesn't lend itself to tractable models. The question is whether potential investors will sit on the money they've got until there's an up-turn in the economy, when a investment is going to pay of faster.

If they can see an up-turn in the economy - even if it driven by deficit-funded stimulus spending - they are more likely to invest. That puts investor confidence into the equations, which complicates the math.

But you do have to understand what is actually happening, rather than blinding yourself to the stuff that isn't easy to model.

You and James Arthur seem to be fans of equally antiquated and inadequate economic theory.

That does make it your personal wealth, even if you haven't chosen to spend it.

But you haven't invested it yet.

It's a tool that lets you to buy the oscilloscope, which makes it a higher level tool.

And it takes time to save up enough to pay to have house built. Those savings aren't doing anything useful until the house is built.

That was Keynes other insight - that real markets don't clear over-night and that using money as a store of wealth puts a delay between accumulating the money to invest and the existence of a productive investment.

And it's easier to build a house than it is to dig a cave, although the Swedish have got very good at making space in hard rock for relatively little money.

Soft rock tends to need supporting structure, which makes the caves more expensive.

The US is throwing away a lot more money on defense projects - as much as the next seven nations down the pecking order combined - than seems to be necessary.

Historically, the top dog spent as much as its two nearest rivals combined.

In reality, it seems more likely to be a conspiracy between US politicians and the US defense industry to rip off the tax-payers.

It has been going on for a while

Mary Kaldor's book was published in 1981, and Dwight Eisenhower warned about the military industrial complex in 1961.

tand we're heading for disaster.

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ve debt.

not possible for them to balance the budget, much less even begin to pay do wn the debt, at this magnitude of debt service and our spending levels, wit hout causing some kind of catastrophic political and economic upheaval. The economy will never grow to match this black hole of squandered wealth, it' s actually falling short of keeping up with what we have now.

ear, so that we're heading for a $1 Trillion annual debt service within abo ut 14 years. This is almost certainly a low ball estimate because the gover nment is going to start to have to increase borrower yields sometime soon, to remain competitive.

The quantitative easing and the zero interest rates were a direct and consc ious reaction to the global financial crisis. The Great Recession seems to be over - though Trump's trade wares seem aimed at restoring it - and quant itative easing has stopped, and interest rates are being allowed to come ba ck up again.

That might be good advice in Sydney, where property prices have dropped abo ut 10% in the past year, if you could find anybody willing to sell.

The NSW state government has an $A8 billion hole in it's budget because it isn't getting the stamp duty it expected from the property sales that haven 't happened.

At the moment the economists are talking about a "correction" rather than a "crash". Australia's banks are better regulated than their US equivalents, if nowhere near well enough - part of the reason for the property slump is a Royal Commission into Australia's banks

which has revealed a lot of dubious behavior, and it has suddenly become ha rder to get a mortgage.

If we had America's banking regulations (and a much bigger house market) we too could have created a global finacial crisis.

Happily, "dubious behavior" involves a lot less money than "irresponsible r apacity"

etrate the US sector of the Arctic undetected on 25 April 2006, leading to a USAF investigation according to a Russian source.[44]

The statistics are hard to fake. Death certificates come with a lot of soci al baggage.

Krw wants to reinterpret the figures in a way that he finds easier to live with. That's spin.

Every culture has self-induced deaths - throw in smokers, as one should, an d the pecking order would be different again.

Depression is a medically recognised and medically treatable condition. If the US health care system csn't manage to do as good a job of treating depr ession and preventing the premature deaths it causes as can other national health systems, the US has a problem which even krw ought to be able to rec ognise.

Krw can't recognise anything that requires him to adjust his thinking, so t his won't happen, but it should.

Surely you are joking? There is nowhere in the world that has such a high level of nationalism and nationalistic pride as the USA. Remind us again - what was that TV reality drop-out's slogan as you elected him to run your country?

A sizeable proportion of your population are still angry about the war you fought with yourself.

(You are still right about other parts of the world bearing grudges for ancient wars.)

Absolutely true. So is any hatred.

The even sadder part is that those who were lucky enough to guess correctly are assumed to be smarter than all the others, and policy is then based on their next semi-random guesses.

What peace did you have in mind? We haven't been at peace in many years. The wars could certainly get hotter. The deep state hawks have been trying to prod Russia into war for years now.

If it were really unavoidable it wouldn't be shameful (which it is).

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

make america great AGAIN.

He's right in that we have run low on self-interest. He's right about a lot of stuff.

Maybe 1%, probably much less now. I grew up in Louisiana and know a little about that.

We admittedly wouldn't admit that Boston Creme Pie was a Yankee invention. We called it "Congo pie."

The Koran says that muslims should unite and conquer all the infidels, and defines what "muslim" means. Clearly sunnis and shiites are both muslims, so why do they bomb one anothers mosques?

On Dec 16, 2018, John Larkin wrote (in article):

resulting

Joe Gwinn

That's easy. Climate change. When people start dying in large numbers and t he only remediation technologies available require trillions $$$ investment . The idiots are already paying $100B annual just for recovering from extre me weather damage, and it hasn't sunk in this is an ongoing annual occurren ce and not a 100 year event.

There are lots of many-kilowatt HF transmitters. With a lot of receive antennas and a lot of signal processing, it should be possible to track planes and ships. Chain Home was an HF radar; so was the Dew Line, and Jindalee. Just let someone else pay for the transmitters.

I guess with the Internet, megawatt shortwave radio stations may disappear. Maybe the HF spectrum will get quieter.

There are surely zillions of synthetic-apearture radars in orbit. Certainly zillions of optical and IR spy satellites.

I wonder if anything can be done with lightning as a radar transmitter. Probably not useful; there's not enough lightning.

Jindalee is visible on Google Earth. There must be other big mysterious arrays around the world.

The 180 degree flip is ironic: the Left hates Russia now.

Hurricanes and fires haven't got more numerous or intense lately; actually the opposite. But more houses are being built in harms way.

Why don't more people harden their houses against storms and fires? Insurance, I guess.

John Larkin wrote

There is no flip, creation of a common enemy to create unity and justify more taxes for defense is as old as the world.

The political show is just to make the threat look real, just like glowballworming.

Oh that's an easy one. Everything is now divided politically, the right likes Russia now, so the left has to hate 'em.

George H.