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- [00:00]
A
Good morning, Tyler.
- [00:01]
B
Good morning, Alex. We're here for another round of Marginal.
- [00:04]
A
Revolution podcast and today we're going to be talking about debt, most specifically about federal debt. It is now pretty big. The federal debt held by the public, it's about 30 trillion and GDP is also about 30 trillion. So another way of saying is that we have a debt to GDP ratio of about 100%. You know, that's $87,000 per person in the United States, $150,000 per adult. The interest rate on the federal debt is about 3.4% as we're speaking today and 3.4% of $30 trillion. That's about 1 trillion. So the interest expense on the US debt will be about $1 trillion this year. That's about the same as we're spending on national defense or Medicare, only Social Security is a larger share of the budget. And that's just the on, that is just the on budget amount of our debt. Do you know this James Hamilton paper? Have you seen that some time ago looking at the off budget.
- [01:23]
B
Sure, of course, yeah.
- [01:24]
A
So if you take James Hamilton points out that there's also big off balance sheet liabilities. So the federal government has implicitly or sometimes explicitly promised to pay out big amounts for Social Security, implicit promises for Medicare. If you add all these up and think about the net, the present value of all of the promises which we have promised to pay. The Bureau of Fiscal Services estimates that the present value of federal government liabilities just for Social Security is about 34 trillion. Medicare another 62 trillion. That's about 100 trillion that we haven't earmarked the taxes to pay. So putting those together, that doubles the federal debt. Now you can debate these numbers, but either way the federal debt is pretty large and growing. How worried should we be?
- [02:27]
B
Let's see if you can dent my relative optimism. So my first question for you is Alex, are you short the 30 year bond? Laughing means no, but continue.
- [02:41]
A
I mean it's hard for me how I'm not sure if I could. Can I short it? I mean just buy puts.
- [02:47]
B
I'm going to be on interest rates.
- [02:48]
A
On the interest rates. Yeah, yeah, because the interest rates go up.
- [02:51]
B
Right?
- [02:51]
A
Right. Okay. Yeah. Maybe after this podcast I will just.
- [02:57]
B
Spend 10k a year doing this every year.
- [03:00]
A
Yes.
- [03:00]
B
And if you're right in being so worried, it'll be a good investment. Now it's striking to me that rates of mostly fallen this year. So you said right now the rate was 3.4. It's a pretty flat term structure. But the rate of inflation is about 3%.
- [03:15]
A
Yeah.
- [03:15]
B
And it will probably stay somewhat elevated, maybe even more so. The real rate of borrowing for our government is well below 1%. So the market is telling us this is okay. And the flat term structure, relatively flat, is also telling us this is okay. It doesn't mean we spending the money wisely or that it won't involve too much deadweight loss or crowding out of more valuable goods and services. I'm not saying everything's fine on those fronts, but just in terms of will there be a financial crisis? It couldn't look better.
- [03:47]
A
Now, I worry about this. Usually you worry, but I worry.
- [03:51]
B
You started off worried, so I'm going to take the contrary position.
- [03:54]
A
I know. You know, as Rudy Doornbush once remarked, in economics, things take longer to happen than you think they will. And. And then they happened faster than you thought was possible. I remember prior to Covid, as Covid was happening in China, I was very concerned and I was telling people around me we need to stock up on masks. I did stock up on masks. I got my foot. And yet the stock market kept going up and up and up. And it kept going up until like really pretty late in March, April. Right. And then suddenly, you know, it fell. So I worry the same thing could happen with the debt, but in that.
- [04:42]
B
Case it going up early. That was in fact the correct response because the stock market ended up higher before the pandemic was over. So it's that it ever fell that was wrong.
- [04:53]
A
Well, I mean, we don't know. We ended up in one possible world. There were many possible worlds we could have ended up in, but once the market saw. But it didn't make a lot of sense for the market to fall. I mean, a lot of companies, you know, had very reduced revenues. The hotels and the airlines and so forth, you know, they had to collapse in price.
- [05:13]
B
But it became clear it would be temporary and the market got cheery again. I agree it's all strange, but I'm not sure it helps the case for panic. To cite a case where things worked out fine, not fine for the people who died, but I mean, in terms of the market reaction, it worked out fine.
- [05:28]
A
I do agree that it is puzzling that the interest rate on bonds is so low. Hannah Lustig and his co authors have an interesting paper on this. You know, they point out that not only is it the case that we have all of this debt with no plans to pay it, as far as we can tell right now, but the debt is not a very Good asset in the sense that when will the debt be paid? Well, if it is going to be paid, it's going to be paid when the times are good. But that means that you're being paid when GDP is higher and the marginal utility money is low. And when is the debt not paid? When does it get bigger? It means when the economy is doing poorly. So the debt as a asset has the opposite kind of structure than you would want. It's not like gold, which arguably goes up in good times, goes down in good times and goes up in bad times. So you get some nice covariance to even out your portfolio. The debt as an asset is positively correlated with good times and that's bad. So you should expect the interest rates to be much, much higher than they actually are.
- [06:46]
B
But the easy out there is just to say it's always going to be paid. Let me give you a way of reconceptualizing the problem. So the Honoluluk paper, which is called US Public Debt Valuation Puzzle, like a lot of work on debt, it focuses on flows. Well, there's the rate of interest, there's government spending. But if you look at stocks, look at the stock of wealth in the United States. So a common estimate from the past was, well, wealth is six to eight times higher than gdp. That's a little misleading. How do you value all the wealth? How liquid is it? But still, we all know there's a lot more wealth than gdp. And if your economy stays at peace, if anything that ratio rises. Could you. You build things, they're pretty durable. None of it is destroyed by bombs. So we're just headed to having more and more wealth. And if you take say 100% debt to GDP ratio and you think wealth is six to eight times higher, what's our debt to wealth ratio? Well, it's going to depend what kind of wealth, how liquid, blah, blah, blah. But let's say it's like 20%. Let's say you had a debt ratio of 20% to your wealth at some point in the history of your mortgage. I bet you did. You weren't worried. Why should the US be worried?
- [07:57]
A
And the US is a much longer lived entity presumably than I am.
- [08:01]
B
That's right. You could have 200% debt to GDP ratio. And in terms of your debt to wealth ratio, again, it's somewhat arbitrary. But say it's 40 to 50%. That might be on the high side. It's not pleasant. But I've been in that situation with mortgages.
- [08:18]
A
So I think a lot depends upon whether the economy and wealth is growing faster than debt. This brings us to the famous discussion of R and G. Right. You remember Piketty when Piketty came out? Of course, Piketty's whole thing was R was bigger than G. Right? Now he was interested not in debt. He was interested in inequality. And his argument, just to remind the reader, it's a little bit of an aside, but this will. This will get us somewhere. His argument to remind the followers was, if R is bigger than G, if the interest rate, the return on capital is bigger than the growth rate of the economy, then you get growing inequality. Because people who save, you know, their wealth grows. It grows faster than the economy grows. So you get this tremendous growth in inequality. Now, I wasn't terribly worried about this myself. You know, Piketty didn't really take into account a lot of rich people. I mean, they have kids. Like Elon Musk has got, I don't know, 14 kids now.
- [09:22]
B
How many heirs?
- [09:22]
A
Yeah, well, we'll see. 13 heirs, I think. You know, if he distributed his money that way. Bill Gates is giving his money away. Warren Buffett is giving his money. Buffett's not even giving it to his kids. And fortunes rise, fortunes fall, the tech fortunes. It's not like we are. When people talk about inequality, they're not really upset about the Rothschilds. Some of them are. Definitely. Some of them are.
- [09:54]
B
That's a different podcast.
- [09:55]
A
That's a different podcast. They're worried about the Bezos and the Elon Musk of the world. But that's all new wealth. That's not generated at all because R is bigger than G. You know, that's generated by tack, which is a good thing anyway. Okay, now, why do we care this R bigger than G? Well, Blanchard argues that R is less than G. Now, to be fair, Piketty is talking about the return on capital. That's his R. G being the growth rate of the economy. Blanchard is talking about R being the return on safe bonds. And if R now, the return on safe bonds is lower than G, then GDP is growing over time faster than the debt, which means that we will eventually pay it off. It'll eventually become much, much cheaper. So if R is less than G, we don't have to worry about the debt. Is R less than G?
- [10:57]
B
You know, in previous decades and decades is the right word here. I used to be very fond of the R versus G framework, but I've moved away from it more and more.
- [11:06]
A
So have I.
- [11:06]
B
And the more you think about wealth, you know, you're director of the Public Choice Center. It's just all a public choice question. So let's take Greece, which had a true inability to pay debt and default and everything exploded. Right? It was terrible. Greece could have paid off the debt just by confiscating wealth. Now, I'm not saying they should have, but not Burkina Faso, you know, not Chad, but the normal wealthy countries we're talking about, they can always pay off the debt, certainly the U.S. the real question is the political economy. One, will your citizens let you tax them more and or spend less? And that's up for grabs. So the markets are judging that the United States is very willing to make any necessary changes. That actually fits with my picture of this country and the years of the Trump second term. There's a lot of policy I don't like, but one thing they show in a bad way largely. But we are willing to turn on a dime and go from being like the free trade nation to the protectionist nation or whatever else. And the parties can flip positions. And that in some ways makes the market, I think, more optimistic on our ability to do what is needed. You look at World War II, America rises to the occasion. You look at the war on terror, it had many mistakes, but to just say, well, the US Was willing to do some pretty radical things quite differently. All of a sudden you look at Covid, you see the same. We spent all these trillions after what was supposedly this era of austerity. So there's a long historical record of the US turning on a dime, for better or worse. And then I think you can just say we have so much wealth, the gr it determines how painful the adjustment will be. Obviously you want a higher growth rate, but it's not really the thing in the model that matters. It's just the political economy. What are people willing to put up with? Same with Japan. It is believed correctly or not, the Japanese citizenry is willing to do its duty and put up with, be it tax hikes or changes in policy if need be. And so the rate on Japanese debt, while higher than it used to be in real terms, it's still quite low. I think that's a much better framework.
- [13:17]
A
Yeah, yeah, I agree with you. I enjoy the R less than G R bigger than G debates as an intellectual exercise. What happens in the long run? But yeah, I mean, I think the issue with debt is not about insolvency, it's about illiquidity.
- [13:36]
B
Right, right.
- [13:37]
A
And you could still go bankrupt when you're illiquid, even if you're not insolvent. And our Figure less than G is a bit of a sideshow. I agree with you on the political economy. I do think that it's odd though to say that Trump, the fact that Trump can do all of these, make all these big changes, that this reassures the markets. After all, one of the big changes which he is doing is not raising taxes. Right.
- [14:08]
B
Oh, but the tariffs are a huge tax hike.
- [14:10]
A
The tariffs are, yes. We'll see whether that compared to the. We have cut income taxes more than we have plausibly raised consumption taxes through the tariffs. I think the big lesson of Trump is that an unwillingness to raise taxes. So that does seem, it does seem a little bit odd to say that this should reassure that eventually we'll tax wealth.
- [14:40]
B
Right.
- [14:42]
A
There doesn't seem to be any desire or political economy to tax US wealth to pay off this tax.
- [14:49]
B
There's this referendum coming in California to tax what, like the 15 or so richest billionaires in the state? I haven't been tracking it, but I would think there's a decent chance it passes.
- [14:59]
A
We're going to have to tax a lot more than billionaires if we're talking about tax.
- [15:03]
B
I understand, but I'm just saying things that felt unthinkable a short while ago, again, often in bad ways, they now seem thinkable. And that's the lesson of Trump. Like Trump being president seemed unthinkable before he was president. Yeah. And now we're into term two.
- [15:17]
A
Yeah, yeah.
- [15:19]
B
So I wouldn't say it makes the markets more optimistic about everything, but just this old school notion of the Republicans will never support any tax increase. Grover Norquist is in there fighting the good fight. That seems so obsolete to me.
- [15:32]
A
But if you look at taxes as a share of GDP, it has been between like 17 and 20%, you know, for 50 years.
- [15:42]
B
But now it's like 23, isn't it? Or 24. It's gone up permanently. Yes.
- [15:46]
A
I don't think it's that. Not taxes. Spending has, spending has, but I don't actual taxes have not gone up a share of gdp. But you're right that ultimately spending is a tax increase. But where that money is going to come from, I don't think there's any political consensus on that whatsoever.
- [16:06]
B
But I have a prediction where it will come from. We will keep the capital gains rate non indexed as it is now. So higher inflation plus a capital gains tax is partly a wealth tax and will boost wealth taxes by having somewhat higher inflation. You could call it financial repression and we'll pay off some, but not all of the debt that way. And you and I will hate it. But the US is not going to default and it doesn't require a tax hike of the kind you normally think about being contentious. We've already had 9% inflation during the pandemic. Now the rate ongoing seems to be three. That's already a tax hike. People don't like it, but it's accepted and we'll just keep on going and maybe we'll get a bunch of years where it's 7, 8% and we'll converge towards something a little more sustainable.
- [16:53]
A
Okay, so let's put this in a little bit of a framework so we can discuss it. There's five ways to stop increasing debt. One is growth. We'll come to this.
- [17:04]
B
Yeah, and AI may help there. That'll kick in at some point.
- [17:07]
A
Two is default.
- [17:08]
B
Right.
- [17:09]
A
Three is inflation, four is spending cuts and five is tax increases. So you've been talking about tax increases and particularly a tax increase on wealth. I don't see the political consensus for that, though. You're right. You know, things could change just through.
- [17:26]
B
The capital gains rate. Again, we've already hiked that rate in real terms. No one talks about it. Well, you're paying taxes on nominal gains more than you used to.
- [17:36]
A
That's partly true, but. So when you have a higher inflation, there's a difficulty with the higher inflation. So I think higher inflation, which reduces the real value of the debt, okay. It's kind of a quasi default. But higher inflation works when your debt is really high and your deficit is zero or low. Right. Because then it's just on the stock. But when you have higher inflation with a deficit, that is, you're continuing to spend more than you tax, you have to fund that through bonds. And the inflation means that the interest rate on that debt goes up. Right. Fisher effect.
- [18:22]
B
We'll make finance buy more T bills than the market would have brought about on its own. That's the financial repression.
- [18:28]
A
So that's finished.
- [18:29]
B
I agree with your point, and we'll do that too. And it's bad, right?
- [18:32]
A
Yes, But I'm pointing out that inflation as a solution to the debt problem has become much more difficult because unlike, say, after World War II, when we had a lot of debt, but we had very low deficits, right now we've got debt and deficits as far as the eye can see. So inflation, what we gain on the stock, we lose on the flow and it's no longer an easy way out.
- [19:01]
B
That's a good argument, but we all know real Rates now are below half a percent and the term structure of the debt got a lot shorter over the years. That was a mistake. Yes, so far it's a mistake we've gotten away with, which I find hard to believe, but you can see it in the market prices.
- [19:16]
A
Yeah, we have got. Again, I see us. It's like the Wile E. Coyote moment. You go off the cliff and you seem to be hanging there in midair for longer than you think possible.
- [19:31]
B
The boundarialized version of what Alex used to say is betting is a tax on bs, right? Okay, this is a G rated podcast, so I'm waiting for you to short the 30 year bond. There's other things you could do, but that's a simple direct way. Okay, so there's options on interest rate futures, whether that's the best way. But again, that'd be a simple way. Don't use any leverage. You don't need to be in debt.
- [19:56]
A
I mean, I do think that, as Keynes said. I hate to be quoting Keynes, but the market can stay irrational longer than you can stay liquid.
- [20:04]
B
That's not true. Just spend 10k a year doing this, you're not going to run out of money. You probably should spend more than 10k. For sure. You can manage 10k a year. Just flush it down the toilet. I'll be giggling. You may someday be a very wealthy man and then you'll be giggling. Okay, but nothing's stopping you.
- [20:26]
A
I worry though, that even if I did that, then according to you, they're just going to tax my wealth.
- [20:31]
B
Right, but they'll tax it anyway. You might as well have them tax higher wealth than lower wealth. Do I hear 100k a year? I got you up to 10. At least. Rhetorically.
- [20:42]
A
I mean, yeah, it seems like that. It seems like that strategy pays off only in the state of the world in which you don't get to keep the money, you don't get to keep the returns because they come after your wealth.
- [20:56]
B
Progressive taxation discourages any good investment. Right, but still you try to make better investments. You might put less time into it, but now you know exactly what to do.
- [21:05]
A
Okay, so we have some argument for tax increases, or that's one. You think that's a plausible political outcome moving forward? Particularly tax increases on wealth, some inflation. What about default? Now you said the United States is not going to default. Pretty amazing that the Moodys downgraded our debt from aaa.
- [21:33]
B
No one cares. Right? That's just so they can avoid blame if something weird happens.
- [21:40]
A
Still seems pretty remarkable. And you know Microsoft bonds now are paying less in Treasuries.
- [21:46]
B
But that should make you more optimistic. We have this incredible company so rich with revenue, it's a sign AI is going to work. Cloud computing is going to pay off. So that should make you more optimistic if Microsoft is doing well.
- [22:00]
A
Well, it is doing well in the sense that, yes, people expect Microsoft to pay its debts more than they expect the US government to pay its debts. There is a puzzle, however, in that. So let's turn to growth as a way of paying off the debt and Microsoft doing well and AI doing well. Now, that should be raising real interest rates.
- [22:33]
B
Correct. And it's not. It depends. Getting back to your earlier point, we mean the rate of return on equity or the borrowing rate for the government. There's a big difference there. But still, you don't see evidence that it's mattered yet, right?
- [22:46]
A
Yeah, Right. And that seems so people do say, yes, okay, AI could increase gdp, increase wealth so much that we'll be able to pay our debt without any problems. You and I, while we're positive, optimistic on AI, neither of us think that we're going to get into the boomer scenario of ending scarcity.
- [23:16]
B
20% growth a year. No, not going to happen.
- [23:18]
A
Yeah. So even I would be very happy if we increase the rate of productivity growth by 0.5%.
- [23:25]
B
Right. That's been my prediction as a default, but that would not solve the problem. That would make it sustainable. That's right on the knife edge number. That would make it all work.
- [23:35]
A
Yeah, exactly.
- [23:36]
B
So if that's your modal forecast, don't buy those puts. Now, we'd agree there's a lot of variance on any AI forecast, right? Yes. It could even be regulated. Even if you're sure on the tech side, a lot's just going to happen. But say it's 0.2% productivity growth in the growth rate, that's a huge help. It gets you almost half the way there to a coherent adjustment.
- [23:59]
A
Yeah.
- [24:00]
B
And that's again, reason to not be too pessimistic.
- [24:02]
A
Yeah. Now, to be clear, a 0.5% increase in the rate of productivity growth, that doesn't seem like a lot, but that would be historically a bigger increase than we got from, you know, anything. I mean, a bigger increase in the Internet.
- [24:20]
B
Sure, yeah. I mean, it is the Internet in.
- [24:22]
A
A way, but yes, it was founded on the Internet. Yes. But yeah, yeah, the Internet was the, you know, the agar culture for the growth of the AI.
- [24:31]
B
That's why the Internet's important. We're just Beginning to realize this, right?
- [24:34]
A
Exactly. Yeah. Yeah.
- [24:36]
B
It's why a lot of people can't admit AI might be a good thing, because then they'd have to admit the Internet was a good thing. And they're so committed to never saying that.
- [24:43]
A
Is that why.
- [24:44]
B
That's why? Yes, believe me, that's why.
- [24:48]
A
It is funny that.
- [24:51]
B
The.
- [24:52]
A
I think historically, when we look back, I think you're right. We'll think about what was the Internet? Well, the Internet was the growth culture, was the. Just putting everything online was for the AIs. It wasn't for us. Right?
- [25:07]
B
That's right, yeah. Yeah.
- [25:10]
A
That's surprising. I don't think anyone thought about that.
- [25:13]
B
I do have a worry with AI. It's not a worry from a human welfare point of view, but from a fiscal point of view. So the incidence of AI, it's quite uncertain. Fair to say, yes. But let's say one big positive effect is it cures a lot of diseases. And many people now who die at 70 live to 96. Right. To me, it's pretty plausible over some time frame. That could make the budget worse. It's great for people, but you've got to spend a lot more on health care. Yeah. We're not sure how productive they'll be in those extra 26 years. So to say it boosts growth by some amount, the distribution of that boost is really going to matter. It could also be some of the gains of AI go to land. So land in San Francisco is worth much more. Loudoun county, the data centers, that's worth more. Now, the federal government is not very good at taxing land, or they don't do it in a very effective way on purpose. That may change. And I know federal, state, local, it's ultimately some consolidated entity, but it could be a lot of the gains will go to places we're not very good at taxing or not very interested in taxing. And again, the fiscal upside could be less than it looks from the excitement about all the wonderful things it will do.
- [26:27]
A
Yeah. So AI could raise welfare more than wealth.
- [26:30]
B
Exactly.
- [26:31]
A
Yeah.
- [26:32]
B
Or it will be wealth informs that don't translate into paying off T bills very readily.
- [26:38]
A
Exactly.
- [26:39]
B
Yeah. And a lot of it could be abroad in very poor countries. That's wonderful, but very hard to forecast. But that makes me somewhat more pessimistic on the fiscal side.
- [26:49]
A
Yeah, yeah. Increase in life expectancy is a very big deal. After all, when you're rich, as people in the United States already are, more goods, you know, you're just pushing them down the marginal utility curve.
- [27:03]
B
Right.
- [27:04]
A
But if you're already rich, a increase in life expectancy means that you could enjoy years where you're rich. So you know, it's especially valuable the richer you are.
- [27:16]
B
And there'll be all these new treatments that voters demand. Again, that's a great thing. But someone has to pay for them. And probably a lot of that would be our government.
- [27:24]
A
Yeah. And AI seems like exactly the type of thing which could increase life expectancy.
- [27:29]
B
Sure.
- [27:30]
A
Right. I mean, biology is such a complex system. It's precisely the kind of system that AI ought to be very good at understanding and improving.
- [27:39]
B
And there's going to be, in my view, high returns to labor. But those could be welfare rather than wealth. So the fact that you even now can get free legal advice of very high quality, I get there are longer run wealth effects, easier to start a new business. But a lot of the gains are just you feel less stressed, you save time, you have much more leisure time. We see that already. So many of the AI gains so far are just a task that took you three hours, now takes you five minutes. I'm all for that. But it may be welfare rather than wealth.
- [28:13]
A
Yeah.
- [28:14]
B
And more leisure time. It's not the same as living longer, but it's like more time for you. If that's the biggest effect, again, fiscally it's not as good as it might have sounded at first.
- [28:24]
A
Yeah, leisure don't pay the bills.
- [28:26]
B
That's right.
- [28:31]
A
I guess the bottom line is that AI is a source of growth. The growth that we get might not be the kind of growth that helps us to pay off the bills. In which case again, we still are left with default inflation, spending cuts. We haven't talked much about spending cuts.
- [28:51]
B
Let me just say the kind of growth you want to pay the bills. It's worth thinking about what that will look like. I'm not sure we know, but my superficial intuition is to think. If you have a lot of lawyers earning 600k a year living in New York and California, just paying income tax at a high rate, of course they'll end up owning capital, but the core income is just taxed at the income tax rates. They don't have that many shelters. They're not wealthy enough to do super tricky things through Dubai. Those seem exactly the jobs at risk because of AI and they're the jobs that are net, putting a lot of money into the pot. So that's another way to think about the possible tension here between welfare and the fiscal side.
- [29:32]
A
Yeah, yeah. If we think about Lawyers, doctors, accountants, they're all doing pretty well, but very subject to AI.
- [29:44]
B
And the AI will help some of those people create these billion dollar companies, which will do a better job, but that's taxed at the capital rate. And we get back to higher taxes on capital gains and. Or wealth, which sort of merge into each other to some extent. And that, to me, is what the future looks like. I don't like it, but I'll take the wealth. If that's the price of the wealth, it's probably a good trade off.
- [30:07]
A
UBI pro or against?
- [30:09]
B
No, we're not going to. We're not going to see it. Yeah. The notion that one person works and the neighbor doesn't work and gets money, it's proven so politically unpopular. I just don't think it's that relevant. I also don't think it's in the randomized control trials, which I think Sam Altman helped to fund. It didn't make people better off. So it's not a good idea. People need to work. Covid showed that politically it's a loser. It's like a carbon tax. You can think of good arguments for it, but it's just not what the future is. Even with very powerful AI.
- [30:45]
A
So we have all of this debt right now. We are still accumulating even more debt. You know, we got ourselves into trouble with first a financial crisis and then with COVID How high is it going to go?
- [31:02]
B
I don't know. To hit 200% of GDP seems obviously to be expected. And if there's a major war, then all bets are off. That could happen. But I don't see the political forces that keep us away from 200%. Now it seems we can manage that. It may not be what you want in terms of resource allocation, but we'll hit it and people won't care is my best guess.
- [31:28]
A
Yeah. Okay. So you think that a combination of tax increases. Oh, yeah. Yeah. We didn't talk much about spending cuts. You think anything?
- [31:37]
B
No, not gonna happen.
- [31:38]
A
Yeah, not gonna happen.
- [31:39]
B
I would love it.
- [31:40]
A
Yeah.
- [31:40]
B
Look, healthcare is the sink you can pour more and more money into. It's politically popular. I just don't see us stopping.
- [31:48]
A
Okay. All right.
- [31:49]
B
Here's another perspective I've been toying with lately. This focuses on Japan, but it relates to the U.S. it turns out there's this recent paper in Journal of Economic Perspectives. Hanno Lustig is co author on it. He's a great economist with Yili Chan and Wexin. Do forgive my pronunciations, on how Japan has Kept its debt sustainable. And it turns out Japan is running a sovereign wealth fund, in essence through its public pension scheme. And that sovereign wealth fund, which is what I'll call it, it's not called that formally, but it's done very well. They've made good picks. So Japan is a lot more leveraged than it seems. And if US equities really went south, that's where a lot of their good picks have come from. Japan would truly be in fiscal trouble. So their situation is riskier than it looks. Their current net liability is way lower than it looks because on the equity side they've earned so much. But if you think US is facing systematic risk, US and Japan are much more correlated than it looked to begin with. And they already seem to be pretty highly correlated. So this idea I've been thinking about lately, like, is the world becoming more correlated or less correlated across countries, asset classes with Japan, that's been moving in the wrong direction. And the US to some extent through public sector unions. Like you ever give a talk at a financial institution or even a crypto VC fund, and so many of the people you speak to, like they work for a public sector employees union because they're investing the fund in that. That's our sovereign wealth fund, smaller than Japan's, it turns out. But we're making these leveraged bets on equities. And as you know, equities have done well since the early 1980s, but my goodness, a lot is riding on that and now it's riding on AI. So the AI thing, it's more knife edge than people even think. And they already think it's pretty knife edge, so that stuff had better work.
- [33:54]
A
And the equities, I mean, yes, equities have gone up, but I think a lot of that is just due to falling interest rates, right? I mean, if you discount, if you discount, it's not that the future flows have gotten bigger, it's that we are discounting the future flows at a lower rate. Which means, you know, the, the, the present value goes up, but we're not richer over time.
- [34:21]
B
And there's a funny circularity. Maybe the interest rates have stayed low because equities have gone up and Japan is not going to default or have to raise taxes a lot. And then it's like, well, elephants all the way down. But what's beneath the elephants? Low interest rates, high equity prices all the way down. I feel okay about that. Maybe the world is always built on this sort of circularity of asset value. Certainly the value of money is circular in A sense and always has been. But you just wake up and you realize this mechanism operates a little more than you'd like to feel comfortable with.
- [34:55]
A
Yeah.
- [34:55]
B
Yeah.
- [34:57]
A
Okay. Have we reached any conclusions about debt and deficits, Tyler?
- [35:01]
B
Well, I want to hear your pending portfolio decisions once you decide to make them. I'm still at a point of relative calm. My modal scenario is pretty positive. But I am realizing you see this in crypto prices as well. The original story was hedge against the dollar.
- [35:17]
A
Right.
- [35:18]
B
They're not a hedge against anything. They're very correlated. That's okay. But when you see more and more things being correlated together, and maybe this operates through mechanisms of good governance, bad governance, you ought to get more nervous. So I'm super nervous on the things seem to be more correlated front. Still not that nervous on the modal scenarios front. And I hope to live long enough to see. And maybe AI can enable that, too.
- [35:45]
A
Yeah, I do. Just to conclude, I do think it is ironic that crypto found product market fit in putting the dollar.
- [35:56]
B
That's right. Stable coins.
- [35:58]
A
Satoshi Nakamoto would be quite upset, I think to find out that would be.
- [36:05]
B
I would say is.
- [36:07]
A
No, no, he's long gone. He's long gone. Okay. All right. So a more correlated world is a more dangerous world. But still, you're not worried about the.
- [36:20]
B
Debt per se, and it's a world with more upside.
- [36:24]
A
Yes.
- [36:24]
B
So I am worried about the debt, but I'm worried about it in, you know, extreme cases in the middle of the distribution. I think we're doing better than most people believe.
- [36:34]
A
Okay. Very good. Thank you, Tyler.
- [36:35]
B
Thank you, Alex.