Adam Davidson
speaker
76 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Aug 2011
last heard Aug 2011
Adam Davidson’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsNo recordings in the last 12 months.Older appearances are listed below; set an alert to hear about the next one.
Appearances
The way it works, just the very basics, is governments borrow money slightly differently from how we do.
They basically give out IOUs.
They call them bonds or notes or bills, but basically IOUs.
So you say, I want to lend the US government or the UK government or the French government some money, I'll buy one of their IOUs.
That's the language you use, but you're not buying something, you're lending the money.
In some cases, like in the case of Japan, it's largely their own people lending money to the Japanese government.
In other cases like the US, it's an awful lot of foreigners.
So in the US, we're sort of obsessed with the fact that China is our number one foreign debt holder.
They have
no one knows for sure because these are all private transactions, but they have something in the order of a trillion dollars-ish in U.S.
debt that we owe the Chinese.
That's generally the Chinese government.
Almost, what, 10% of U.S.
debt, nearly?
Yeah.
And more importantly, the Chinese are sort of our most trustworthy customer.
They just keep buying tens of billions of dollars of U.S.
bonds, of U.S.
IOUs every month.
And so the fear here is not so much that the Chinese will
Showing 1–20 of 76 · page 1 of 4
Next →