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US: Long term budget outlook
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    I strongly recommend to check whole report.
    It can look boring initially, but it contains interesting things:

    http://www.cbo.gov/sites/default/files/cbofiles/attachments/06-05-Long-Term_Budget_Outlook.pdf

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  • And the cbo books are slightly "cooked" what about all the unfunded liabilities like Social Security. Add a few more trillion there... That should be added to the numbers too but they wanna cook the books. What if inflation kicks in from all the money printing and they have to raise interest rates? Then the debt becomes the worlds largest ARM or Adjustable rate Mortgage loan... How sustainable is the debt when the interest on it is 8-9%, what if it had to be raised to 16% like the 80's.

  • A lot of "what if's". Truth (very trivial, but often we dismiss trivial stuff for being trivial) is that the world economy has become extremely unpredictable since 2007. Nobody knows which predictions to trust anymore, every government in the world can only guess the next moves. Europe guessed that austerity would solve the debt problem, but instead it pushed many countries into recession...

    So all these budget predictions and so on, they are just based on a guessed scenario, and then...... roll the dice.

    What if..... what if China is hit by a crisis, just like it happened to Japan (remember the 80's when Japan was booming and the bookshops around the world were filled with books about why Japan's economy is superior to everything else, why japanese business men are superior beings that never fail, and so on....)

    And here's another what if : nobody talks about Turkey. It's the new boomer, and taking more and more influence in a very sensitive region of the world (competing with Iran, Saudi Arabia and Egypt there). But the Turks have a big problem , everything is on credit there. Economy booms because loads of people are spending money they don't have, even unemployed people walking around with a dozen credit cards, betting on strong economic growth. But if something happens (and it will, remember that Istambul is build on a seismic fault line, between Europe and Asia, and 3/4 of its buildings are not earthquake proof), the whole system will collapse, and this will have a terrible impact on the rest of the world.

    I suggest reading "The Black Swan", by Nicholas Taleb, it's a real eye opener (if you can ignore the fact that the author is a highly narcissistic prick who even uses his theory to promote Apple computers).