Paul Krugman

And there's the old joke, sorry, European, people who work at the European Commission say that they should have a statue in front of the Berlaymont headquarters, a statue of Joseph Stalin, without whom none of this would have been possible.

Okay.

I mean, there's a pretty good

analytical doctrine called functional finance, which is not MMT, although there is a whole other thing, but which says that the number doesn't matter, right?

So just think about the macroeconomics.

And I don't think that's entirely true, but it's largely true.

As long as you're not having uncontrollable inflation, particularly countries that issue debt in their own currency have a lot of running room.

And

I mean, the max, I think the max debt number we've ever seen as a share of GDP would be the UK, which came out of World War II with debt at 250% of GDP.

So, you know, more than double the current U.S.

level.

And there was no debt crisis.

Now, you can argue that there was a fair bit of financial repression and controls.

But, you know, we haven't lost the ability to do that if necessary.

But in any case, I don't think that was the issue.

I think there were...

you know, it's imprudent to just keep on running up that debt-to-GEP ratio.

But there is not a hint in anything I can see that we're hitting any kind of limit.

You know, people who bet against JGBs or against Japanese debt because of their debt levels have just lost money and lost money and lost money over the years.

It's...