eli5: Why is the US commonly called the “wealthiest country” if we have 30T in debt?
In: 5
Have you seen all the aircraft carriers and nuclear submarines we have?! And the stealth bombers and intercontinental ballistic missles?! We are the richest country and we’ll “send democracy” to any country who says otherwise.
But no, for real. The vast majority of international trade is conducted in the United States dollar. We can print all the dollars we want. Trillions upon trillions of them for any random bank run or pandemic or whatever reason that comes up. You want dollars?! We got em!
So other countries send us real valuable consumer goods and we send them dollars. Dollars that we just make up. We’ve really got a good thing going for us.
To make it even better, united states treasury bonds are a fantastic low risk place to store wealth. Like if you’ve just gotten a boat load of dollars in exchange for a boat load of oil. You don’t want it to just sit in the bank doing nothing. But it needs to he somewhat liquid because you have a business to run. Might as well buy us treasury bonds. After all the u.s. has all those aircraft carriers and nuclear missles to make sure they can always print dollars.
We really have a good thing going for us.
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