Yeah, the nutcases pressing Biden to create a "no-fly zone" (ie. shoot down Russian planes, ie. start a war with Russia) are going to end up causing WWIII. They're making me dust off my nuclear-war preparedness plans, find my potassium iodide, etc.

BTW, it's a common misconception that global nuclear war would instantly kill everyone and be the end of the world. If you live more than 10-20km from a major city's center, you'll probably survive the initial blasts. Then if you know how to shelter from the fallout in a basement or something for at least a few days, you'll probably survive the radiation. And then if you don't give up, you and your community should be able to adapt to the climate changes caused by "nuclear winter". If you're not right in the middle of a big obvious target, then you're probably not going to be instantly vaporized, so I recommend making some basic preparations.

BTC will probably not be useful for large-scale evasion of sanctions where a sanctioned person wants to buy million-dollar mansions or whatever. Unless the transaction is purely virtual (like a crypto-to-crypto trade), such a large transaction will be noticed at the physical-world/fiat end of the transaction and investigated. Mixers won't help if authorities are looking right at your stuff in the physical world. Maybe the sanctioned individuals will find crypto useful to do small things like buy access to Netflix, but nothing major.

It is important to note, however, that BTC can be used by ordinary Russians to legally* get around the serious issues created by the sanctions. Currently, ordinary Russians will find it almost impossible to send or receive fiat payments internationally because the Russian banks have been sanctioned, but since ordinary Russians are not themselves sanctioned, they can legally* send/receive BTC internationally. If a parallel BTC economy develops in Russia, that'd be great for Bitcoin, for Russians (because they'll be able to escape some of the economic crush of sanctions), and for the world (because it'll give the Russian state less control over its people, making an uprising more possible).

Note that the regions of Crimea, Luhansk, and Donetsk are ~completely embargoed by US sanctions, so even ordinary people in those areas are sanctioned.* And there are other complicated details of the sanctions.

* As far as I can tell. I am not a lawyer, and this is not legal advice.

The Ukraine situation has (rightly) been consuming all the oxygen, but a very important piece of news for the US is that Biden announced his Supreme Court pick recently, Ketanji Brown Jackson. What do you think of her?

I strongly dislike how Biden announced in advance that he was only going to consider ~6.8% of the population based solely on race and sex instead of anything that the potential candidate had any control over. I also dislike that with her, 8 out of the 9 justices will be Ivy League graduates, which isn't exactly a diverse group of justices. (There's a very distinct ruling class in the US. Two of the Supreme Court justices went to the same high school, Jackson is related by marriage to Paul Ryan, etc.) And although it's difficult to get a good read on her legal philosophy before she's actually on the Court, the fact that Biden is nominating her means that she will probably be far from a constitutional-textualist, which will end up being my biggest problem with her long-term.

That said, there are several things I like about Jackson:
 - She seems likely to be supportive of criminal justice reform: her uncle was sentenced to life in prison for nonviolent drug offenses, she helped write improved sentencing guidelines, and she wrote a thesis on how prosecutorial discretion & plea bargains are a perversion of justice. I am very supportive of reforming the broken US criminal justice system.
 - As a public defender, she defended the rights of even unpopular people, such as a Guantanamo Bay detainee and a convicted tax evader.
 - She's had several rulings in favor of corporations and against the government, which shows that she's at least not 100% partisan.

One of the biggest things that Republicans are complaining about is the McGahn ruling, but IMO that's a pretty unimportant case in the grand scheme of things, not necessarily indicative of any partisan bias, and although I don't care much about the underlying legal question, I suppose that I like that her ruling was against the power of the already-overly-powerful executive branch.

Overall, although she's obviously not going to be anywhere near as good as my favorite justice, Gorsuch, I think that she was probably among the best nominees that a Democrat could be expected to nominate.

Only if you fire against someone who can fire back. Ukraine has no nukes, and doesn't have a mutual defense alliance with anyone with nukes. There is zero chance that NATO would fire nukes against Russia in retaliation, just as they didn't send in ground troops in response to the ground invasion. (If Russia nuked eg. Poland, then we'd have full-scale global nuclear war.)

On your other points, I hope you're right, but I'm worried that Putin may actually be mad. I can't see how any part of this Ukraine invasion is rational from any perspective.


I agree that there is a probably-wrong perception that Ukraine is on a path to defeating Russia within the next few years, though things have clearly been going much worse for the Russians than they expected. It's hard not to focus on this little speck of justice in this tragic, unjust situation.


Who's going break them up? Whoever controls Russia's nuclear weapons can stop any effort like that by threatening to nuke the aggressor, so you'd have to have the leader of Russia (Putin or his successors) voluntarily give up their nukes, etc.

Since Putin is apparently now a crazy old man with a Napoleon complex, this horrifying thought occurred to me: If Ukraine resists for many weeks, why wouldn't Putin use a nuclear weapon against them? It'd be like the situation with Japan and the US in WWII: Putin can nuke a couple of Ukrainian cities (probably in the western half) and say, "Surrender unconditionally or I'll nuke a couple more." And he could just continue nuking cities until Ukraine capitulated. NATO wouldn't respond with direct military action, Ukraine doesn't have nuclear weapons of its own, and sanctions are already nearly maxed out. I don't see how Putin has much to lose with this strategy (except that it might horrify his direct subordinates or population enough for them to oust him), and it's a sure-fire way to win Ukraine.

You might think that Putin wouldn't want to get a radioactive wasteland as a prize, but that'd be a misunderstanding of the effects of nuclear weapons. Using appropriately-sized nukes, Putin could destroy dozens of cities without making Ukraine generally uninhabitable. The radioactive fallout would cause serious issues (worse in Ukraine and extending worldwide), but it wouldn't kill that many people in most areas, and it would decay in weeks.

To try to prevent this, the West urgently needs to find some way of giving Putin some sort of hope that he personally can improve his situation without conquering Ukraine. As things stand now, there seems to be zero hope of the sanctions ever being lifted as long as Putin is alive, so Putin sees that his only two options are to give up and become an iron-fisted dictator of a poor country, like North Korea, or continue pursuing his dream of restoring the Russian empire at all costs. The West might offer Russia a series of steps that would lead to progressively removing the sanctions, and it might even be worth offering Putin safe personal exile (like Napoleon) so he can retire in peace. He probably wouldn't take a quiet retirement, but it doesn't hurt to offer it.

---

If you're within about 250km of Ukraine, it'd be a good idea to:
 - Put important files onto optical media, since a nuclear EMP may destroy hard drives and SSDs.
 - Buy potassium iodide tablets. In case of nuclear fallout, adults take 130mg/day. This will help your long-term survival, but will absolutely not make you immune to radiation.
 - If possible, prepare 2 weeks of food and water in case you have to shelter from fallout. An appropriate shelter will put as much matter between you and the outside world as possible, without any direct airflow. Air filtration isn't necessary, but air should not be able to flow freely in from the outside. Fallout will especially accumulate on the ground outside and on roofs, so you want your shelter to be far from those. A basement is good if it's deep enough, but a shallow basement isn't ideal because you're too close to the ground outside. A subway would probably have too much air flowing from outside. The middle floors of a very tall building can be used, staying as far as possible from the exterior walls.

This month 125 users were eligible.

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The Institute for the Study of War (ISW) is putting out daily battle updates. Apparently Russia has been bringing in a lot of tanks, and ISW predicts that they will do a major, much more destructive attack on Kyiv tomorrow.


I haven't seen much attacking of the Russian people, and in fact I've seen several government officials and media sources specifically saying that the Russian people aren't at fault here. (That's just from where I'm sitting in the US, of course - it might be different where you are.)

Certainly, nobody should blame the Russian people for this. When ancient Romans invaded some innocent place, could you blame the Roman's slaves for making the soldiers' weapons? To a greater or lesser degree, it's the same sort of thing for every government, including the US. If you are compelled by fate to be a citizen of some country, compelled by force to pay taxes to support your country, etc., then you bear no responsibility for what you are compelled to do, and you do not have a responsibility to put yourself at personal risk to make your country less evil. In my view, even "perfect" democracy would not change this. The average Russian bears zero responsibility for this invasion, just as I disclaim any responsibility whatsoever for the various atrocities committed by the US in the middle east and elsewhere.

But that doesn't mean that Russians should blame the West for their suffering. Putin and other top Russian-government officials bear primary responsibility: they started this aggressive war, accepting that it might cause various forms of suffering for the Russian people. In war, it's always the ordinary people who suffer most rather than the ones who are chiefly responsible for the war, tragically. If Russia had attacked eg. Turkey, then NATO would respond with actual boots on the ground instead of sanctions, and yet the people dying would be ordinary (probably lower-class) NATO-citizens and Russians. Putin, Biden, and the rest of the ruling class wouldn't be out there getting shot.


I hope you're able to get out of Russia! Everyone deserves freedom, no matter where they were born, or to whom.

I think it'd be a great idea for the West to welcome Russian immigrants/refugees in with open arms. Russia already has a very low birth rate, so depleting their population even more would essentially be an additional type of economic warfare, and helping ordinary people escape the sanctions would make them a little less cruel. Unfortunately, I don't think that the West will actually do this, since a lot of people have the incorrect view that the economy is a zero-sum game where immigrants are stealing resources from the destination country's existing citizens. And although I don't think that most Western leaders are actively hostile to the Russian people overall, they probably are too indifferent to the incredible suffering that their sanctions will cause to their fellow man.

Yeah, it seems that Putin severely miscalculated. Everything has gone so poorly for Russia that I have to wonder if Putin is going senile or otherwise having real mental issues. If he actually thought that Ukrainians would welcome him with open arms, then he was really out of touch.

I was completely wrong about this whole thing:
 - I thought that US intelligence was making a big fuss about ~nothing because they've wrongly cried wolf many times in the past, but this time they were right.
 - I thought that Putin wouldn't invade and would be more likely to be playing mind games because he has a history of doing smart things and messing with the West, but I was shocked (even more shocked than I thought I'd be) when he actually went for a Kyiv decapitation strike.
 - Because Russia so obviously outmatches Ukraine and there's really no excuse for them failing, I thought they'd take Kyiv within 24 hours if they decided to do so.
 - The West has a history of putting short-term profit before ideals, so I thought they'd do the minimum reaction they could get away with without looking completely weak, but they actually did some pretty severe sanctions, and they've been investing substantially in defending Ukraine. I was especially surprised by the central bank sanctions and the anti-Russian actions by Turkey and Hungary.

I still think that there's no way Zelenskyy can stay in power for long if Russia stays committed to getting rid of him by any means, but my record is terrible, so who knows.

As some others have said already, banning Russia from SWIFT isn't very useful, and may in fact be counterproductive long-term. Banning them from SWIFT is like this: Imagine that most of Russia's exports were sent to the outside world via UPS, and you ban Russia from using UPS. It's very disruptive short-term (for both sides of the trade), but they're just going to switch to Fedex or whatever. Banning Russia from SWIFT is like that: it's short-term very disruptive, but it's not that hard for Russia to find an alternative, and long-term the ban weakens SWIFT. Banning Russia from SWIFT sounds like you're banning sending money to Russia by any means, but it's not. The West could ban sending money to Russia by any means, but Europe is highly dependent on Russian imports, so they're just going to pretend to "completely cut off Russia" by banning them from SWIFT.

The most damaging thing the West could do without putting boots on the ground would probably be to confiscate Russia's central bank reserves like the US did with Afghanistan's central bank.

If you wanted to get rid of Putin ASAP, I think the most effective thing that could be done would be to put a $1 billion bounty on Putin's head, plus a promise of immunity for any past misdeeds. You have to imagine that many of Putin's close associates would rather this nutcase be dead. The West was more-or-less fine with Russia's internal authoritarianism, and Russia's oligarchs had a good thing going, but now Putin has screwed it all up for them. All of these sanctions are clearly designed to eventually make Russians angry enough to get Putin toppled, but a bounty+immunity would be a lot more effective. (I think that issuing this sort of bounty would be considered an act of war, though.)

---

I was surprised that Kyiv didn't fall last night, and I keep hoping that the Russians are somehow fought off, but it's almost unimaginable that Kyiv isn't going to fall eventually. The force differential is just too large. If Zelenskyy is dedicated to the idea of Ukraine fighting a protracted resistance in the same vein as Afghanistan or Vietnam, he should record a really good speech to broadcast after he is inevitably killed by the Russians, so that he can become an ideal martyr.

The "invasion" of the territories that Russia already occupied since 2014 didn't surprise me; I expected them to do something like that and then stop there. But just before going to sleep last night I was shocked to see that they were apparently doing a full invasion, and I stayed up until 2AM watching the situation unfold...

The information on what's happening is very spotty. Is it possible that Russia "only" did some airstrikes, but they're not going to send in any ground troops outside of the eastern territories? I heard a rumor that Putin gave Zelenskyy an ultimatum to cede eastern Ukraine within 12 hours or else Putin would continue with a full invasion, but I don't know if this comes from a reliable source.

It'd definitely be possible for Ukraine to fight off Russia with a years-long insurgency. The West will be giving them endless supplies, so Russia would have a much harder time than the US had against Afghanistan, for example. But I don't know if the Ukrainians have the will to fight Russia for years, and I don't know that I'd even recommend that they do so, since the costs of this sort of insurgency would be so high.

This situation is so, so tragic. Ukrainians deserve to be free, but many are going to suffer and die for no reason, and the country will probably fall under an authoritarian regime. Russians will suffer a lot, as well: I see no world in which this action does anything but massively hurt the average Russian. Relations between Russia and the West will get even worse. Nothing against the people of these countries, but how does it make any sense that the US has better relations with Vietnam, Japan, and Saudi Arabia than Russia? Russia is part of Europe, their culture descended from Ancient Greece and Rome...

Any country can say whatever they want. The US said that Juan Guaidó was the legitimate president of Venezuela despite him never having any real hold over the country; they recognized the anti-Assad forces as the true leaders of Syria; they recognized the anti-communist regime as the legitimate leaders of Vietnam in the Vietnam War; they long recognized what is now Taiwan as the legitimate leaders of all of China; etc. In all of those examples, the force backed by the superpower lost. I don't know that Ukraine will ever retake effective control of those regions, but it's not as if Russia's declaration is what will put an end to the issue, and it's not as if Russia is the only country with a history of making these sorts of declarations.

If the disputed territories had mostly Ukrainian nationalists, I don't think that Russia could hold it long-term (even if they could win every single battle fought). But the issue is that a sizable percentage of the population in those regions supports Russia. And if Ukraine is too weak to retain the territory, Russia is willing to exert force to take it, and many more residents are willing to fight for Russia than against Russia, then it seems inevitable that the territories will go to Russia.


The "Russiagate" stuff is indeed largely conspiracy nonsense, but Trump is more transactional and self-interested than Biden, so I think he'd be willing to lift sanctions in a few years if he could negotiate a deal with Putin which looked like a win.

I haven't looked into the platform much, but I heard that its rules are designed to create a "family-friendly" environment. Very weird for a "free speech" platform.

I agree with suchmoon that the whole point of this is a cash-grab, not political. Trump will constantly talk about how this app will destroy the media and the Dems and how you (yes you!) can help out by buying DWAC on the stock market. DWAC will largely just funnel money to Trump and his associates, and the app is just designed to be something to point to as a product, like the "diploma" you get from Trump University.

As Parler and others have found out, it's easy to say that you're going to create a free speech platform; it's much harder when you're forced to answer specific questions like:
 - Are you going to allow probable scams?
 - Are you going to allow doxxing and harassment?
 - Are you going to allow vague threats of violence like "Mr. X is bad, someone should really do something about him"?
 - Are you going to allow probable libel (which is no threat to the platform due to section 230)?
 - Are you going to allow advocating for violence as a policy matter (without inciting violence), such as arguing that all athiests should ideally be executed? This is definitely legal under US law, but it can be incredibly controversial.
 - Are you going to allow support for ideas far outside of the Overton window? For example, some extreme pro-choice people believe that it should be legal to kill babies a couple of months after birth, since there isn't much neurological difference between the brains of those humans and the brains of humans a month or two before birth.
 - Are you going to allow people to advocate for illegal things, such as recommending that people use illegal drugs? This might put the poster himself in legal peril in some cases, but is generally not a legal threat to the platform due to section 230.
 - Will you allow grey-area things such as magnet links to torrents for pirated content? How will you know that these things are actually pirated, and not something similar to Linux liveCDs? Some platforms have had the policy of only ever removing these sorts of things after receiving DMCAs, which should be a legally-justifiable position, but if the platform becomes a hotbed for pirated content, then they often still get in trouble (eg. Mega). So places like Youtube have had to create ad hoc and error-prone systems of copyright detection...
 - Many governments (including the US) engage in active propaganda campaigns. Will you allow people to parrot their propaganda misinformation, perhaps honestly, without knowing that it's misinformation or propaganda?
 - If China hires 1000 people to create 1000 accounts (one account per user, not alts) and has them spread misinformation all day, will you allow that?
 - Etc. Etc.

Bitcointalk.org tries to be pretty free-speech-maximalist, and there are forums which go even further, but the ultimate solution is to create a decentralized forum where nothing can be administratively deleted, and so nobody has to make these choices. Learn from Bitcoin and take the human out of it. But making a usable decentralized forum is also incredibly difficult: the first working decentralized forums were created over a decade ago, but even today hardly anyone uses them because none of them have achieved anywhere close to a sufficient level of usability.

He and his administration probably does in fact believe that, but I still lean toward thinking that they're being played. I don't think that Russia will do anything that will result in most NATO countries saying, "Yep, that was definitely an invasion of Ukraine, so now we're doing all of the crushing sanctions we'd planned." If Russia fully withdraws without much incident like they've been publicly saying, then at this point it'd be a big blow to the credibility of Biden/America/NATO. Even more likely is that they continue their threatening posture to keep the West in an uncomfortable state of limbo for months.

I wouldn't bet much against an invasion, though, and on the other side of the argument, if Putin knows that he eventually wants to take a piece of Ukraine, now would be the perfect time. The energy market is currently uniquely favorable to Russia, German politics biases them strongly against cutting all ties with Russia, Putin needs a boost in his domestic approval, etc. Also, if Trump is president in 3 years (a distinct possibility), then an attack against Ukraine years in the past under Biden isn't something that Trump would particularly care about.

It looks like if they will do something, we're most likely to see it in the next few days.

I have a history of being long-term bullish but short-term bearish. I guess my outlook on the world is optimistic, but very cautiously optimistic. Even though I was selling at $0.003, I believed at the same time that BTC would almost certainly go above $1 at some point, and could get into the hundreds. (This was insanely bullish at the time.) I just thought that the price had gotten ahead of its proper trajectory, considering how cheap it was to produce BTC.

Even many years later, it's funny that I happen to have a similar view now: I could easily see BTC above $100k in a few years, but I think we'll probably drop well below $30k for at least part of this year.

I probably still have the CPU somewhere. Taken out of context, my 2010 post makes it sound like I barely had any idea of what a CPU was since I just used the over-broad "Pentium" label, but in fact this was a gaming machine I'd built around 2008, and I chose the specific CPU carefully. It was far from the best CPU available in 2010, but it was probably in the top 5% of retail-oriented CPUs.

I actually measured the energy usage with a Kill-A-Watt with and without mining a few months after that post, and I was getting 160 BTC/kWh. Because the cost of mining 1 BTC was less than a tenth of what 1 BTC was actually priced at at the time, I thought that BTC was substantially overpriced, and so I also have the honor of selling BTC at the lowest prices ever recorded, $0.003/BTC.

It's not against forum rules.

I do consider it rude to share to a PM without permission, though I do not consider it worthy of negative trust. Some others may consider it worthy of negative trust.

I'm like 70/30 on the side that Putin will not do a major invasion. The costs are just too high for Russia. He'll probably do something, but it'll probably be something that won't be clear enough to unify all NATO members. Something like sending only medical units into the Donbas to provide humanitarian aid. I think that this whole thing is most likely to be more of a mind game against NATO than anything.

But I'm far from certain of that. I could also see Putin wanting to really cement his place in Russian history before he dies by trying to achieve a conquest the likes of which the world hasn't seen in a long time. In my very-inexpert opinion, a likely path here would be a false flag attack which makes it look like Ukraine is attacking Belarus, which can then be used as an excuse to engage in a decapitation strike against Kyiv in order to protect Russia's ally.

My heart goes out to all of the innocent people put in danger for the sake of this stupid geopolitical game.

Thank you for mentioning this potential abuse, but I previously already excluded those users from the DT calculation; they are not the cause of The0ldl_lser being included. (You could not have known that I excluded them, since I don't generally announce it.) At the time of the last DT reconstitution, The0ldl_lser was included in this way:

Big requirement:

• Gangster-Hamster
• MoxnatyShmel

Small requirement:

• Gangster-Hamster
• MoxnatyShmel
• stoos
• Vadi2323
• Smartprofit
• F1ak
• Excimer
• DabLjat
• peloso
• airfinex

(Other "voters" may have been possible; these were the ones the system semi-randomly chose to satisfy the criteria.)

In this case I already excluded these users, but it is helpful if people point out potential abuse in the DT reconstitution process, since I don't spend all that much time on it, and I could easily miss things.

Done.

What matters economically is the deficit; the total level of debt doesn't matter much except insofar as the interest payments on the debt affect the deficit.

The main issue with the deficit is that it can cause inflation and/or slow growth (but doesn't always). The huge amount of spending and Fed QE in 2020 and 2021 is one of the main causes of the current high level of inflation, but over the next several years, I don't think that the debt/deficit will be a big issue unless we get more 2020-style spending+QE (which I don't expect soon, at least).

The biggest driver of inflation is when the Treasury runs a deficit and the Fed buys its bonds. From October 2019 to September 2021, the Treasury had a total deficit of $5.9 trillion, and the Fed bought about $3.3 trillion in bonds, so that's $3.3 trillion of pure money-printing. That's extremely inflationary.

From October 2021 to December 2021, the Treasury had a total deficit of $380 billion, and the Fed bought about $221 trillion in bonds. If you multiply by 8 to straightforwardly compare it to the $5.9/$3.3 trillion numbers in the above paragraph, you get a $3.0 trillion deficit funded by $1.8 trillion in money-printing, which is already a reduction. But in reality this is still far too high because spending will go down due to the expiration of certain pandemic-era programs, and the Fed is widely expected to stop buying any more Treasuries staring in mid-March.

Before 2020, the Fed was drawing down its balance sheet, which was actually "destroying" dollars. Soon, maybe as soon as March, the Fed is expected to start doing this again. We'll go from $3.3 trillion in money printed over 2 years to money being destroyed rather than printed. We're moving into an environment somewhat similar to 2019, not a continuation of 2020/2021.

There are other sources of monetary inflation, but they are much smaller in effect than the above-discussed monetization of government debt. For example, in the same October 2019 to September 2021 period as above, lending by private banks created $535 billion. The Fed's open market operations which it uses to set short-term rates, such as reverse repos, can also create money, but I believe that the effect of this on monetary inflation is minor.

There is also not a one-to-one link between monetary inflation and price inflation. For example, it is much more inflationary for the government to send checks to people who will immediately spend it on things than for the Fed's open market operations to enable money market funds to pay rich people more interest on their deposits. And idiosyncratic supply or demand issues can also have effects. But I believe that monetary inflation is the biggest factor in price inflation, especially when you look at longer periods of time.

QE without government spending or increased bank lending does not actually inject money into the economy in any effective way, which is why the QE after 2008 didn't cause inflation. Government deficits without Fed monetization is likely to actually be deflationary, since more and more private money will be sucked up into bonds and used on worthless government waste instead of being used by people to buy things. (Certain types of government spending could be inflationary without Fed monetization. Increasing the debt to send people checks would probably be inflationary, since this would be a transfer of dollars from people who just have their money sitting around to people who are going to use the dollars to buy things. But I think that most government spending will not be efficient enough to have this effect.)

Over the next several years, I expect us to go from an extraordinarily easy-money environment where $3+ trillion was printed, to a tight-money environment where the Fed is on net destroying money. The government deficit will probably go down from 2020/2021 levels toward levels more similar to 2019 because Congress won't be able to pass much, and even if it continues at elevated levels, this will probably make money even more tight. It will take a while for that $3+ trillion of money-printing to completely work its way through the system, but at some point over the next year or two I expect to see <2% in the CPI if things continue on the current track. The shift from extremely-easy money to somewhat-tight money has been and will continue to be very jarring to asset prices; if the Fed gets spooked by crashing asset prices and starts buying treasuries again, then that could change things, though it depends on the details.

Longer term, it's politically impossible for the debt situation to be resolved in any way but money-printing. There's a huge gap between spending and tax revenue, this gap is only getting wider, and literally nobody in Congress is serious about fixing this. Anyone who seriously tried to fix it would be voted out of office immediately. At some point, the debt/deficit will get large enough to create an obvious death spiral of increasing interest payments, the market will want to bring interest rates up to a level that would accelerate this even more, and at this point the Fed will be forced to artificially keep rates low and/or buy bonds. This will cause 4+% inflation for many years, until the inflation fixes the deficit situation. It could also cause the end of the dollar as the world reserve currency. But I don't think that the deficit is large enough to cause this soon. My guess is that the deficit would have to be in the 130-150% of GDP range (around the same as 2020/2021) and continue increasing for several years. The current inflation was caused by a one-time huge increase in both government spending and money-printing, but this is in the rear-view mirror, and the big deficit cliff is quite a bit further ahead.