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OT: World Politics

MindzEye said:

View: https://x.com/inside_nk/status/1805977413106499674

Don't want to be alarmist, but this is how a large but locally bound conflict gets more countries and geographic regions involved in a hurry.

NK sends troops, SK sends weapons. SK weapons kill NK troops, NK goes at the border? US & SK run train on NK....what does China do?
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I was wondering about this during Vlad’s visit. NK’s equipment is shit, and they can’t have that much surplus weaponry. But their armed forces is, what, a million men + strong?

So the one thing they have a ton of is exactly what Vlad needs right now—meat to throw in the grinder. And meat that can be got without having to resort to another mass mobilization and without having to draft more white ethnic Russians from Western Russia & the big cities.
 
LeafGm said:
I was wondering about this during Vlad’s visit. NK’s equipment is shit, and they can’t have that much surplus weaponry. But their armed forces is, what, a million men + strong?

So the one thing they have a ton of is exactly what Vlad needs right now—meat to throw in the grinder. And meat that can be got without having to resort to another mass mobilization and without having to draft more white ethnic Russians from Western Russia & the big cities.
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Might get a few defectors though. Ukraine offered asylum to reluctant Russians earlier in the war. How easy would it be to sway a NK soldier to abandon the cause and come live in Ukraine?
 
manny said:
Might get a few defectors though. Ukraine offered asylum to reluctant Russians earlier in the war. How easy would it be to sway a NK soldier to abandon the cause and come live in Ukraine?
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This is probably a significant mistake by Putin fwiw. SK has kept it's distance from the conflict and so far it's aid has been minimal. But this is really likely to tip them over the edge. South Korea has one of the biggest defence industries in the world (top 5-7 depending on whose numbers you agree with) and they're really, really good at scaling up production in a hurry. They make rocket systems (MLRS), very good tanks (K2's) in high volume and like they did with the Poles, they'll come to your country and help you build out local production so you can have them faster and cheaper. They are really, really not the nation on the periphery of this that Putin wanted to get on the wrong side of.
 
zeke said:
tbh I kinda feel for Milei here - in Argentina's case, inflation actually IS way, way, way out of control and needs drastic steps to deal with it. but i don't know if he knows how to do it. A recession was invitable here......but i'm not certain it's the worst outcome, either.

still though, it's good to note that his prescriptions have a very serious price.



View: https://x.com/CreekPete2/status/1806289073570501052
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Some of the measures they’ve implemented will bring down inflation (it’s already started.)

That said, the fact they used monetary printing presses to prop up fiscal spending in the past is a serious, serious no no. Normally one uses supply of of money in the economy (via the central bank) to manage inflation. It’s purely a monetary phenomenon. The fact they first need to curtail government spending and privatize agencies to do that is seriously messed up, they clearly went off the rails. Tax revenues should underpin government spending, not the central bank.
 
lecoqsportif said:
Some of the measures they’ve implemented will bring down inflation (it’s already started.)

That said, the fact they used monetary printing presses to prop up fiscal spending in the past is a serious, serious no no. Normally one uses supply of of money in the economy (via the central bank) to manage inflation. It’s purely a monetary phenomenon. The fact they first need to curtail government spending and privatize agencies to do that is seriously messed up, they clearly went off the rails. Tax revenues should underpin government spending, not the central bank.
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Remove entire government departments, and remove ~30% of all government spending and of course inflation is going to go down. Pension payouts went down by 35%. That's a whole lot of economic activity to have evaporate more or less overnight. When economists look back at this in 20 years they're going to have a real world answer to the question of "what's worse: a massive depression, or runaway inflation". Now, I get that Argentina's political culture is broken and wasn't fixing this in a measured way (which was possible) so in the end they may look back at this and say it was worth it. But we're into lost generation shit here and with no guarantee that the institutions necessary for the maintainence of a modern economy make it out the other end intact.
 
MindzEye said:
Remove entire government departments, and remove ~30% of all government spending and of course inflation is going to go down. Pension payouts went down by 35%. That's a whole lot of economic activity to have evaporate more or less overnight. When economists look back at this in 20 years they're going to have a real world answer to the question of "what's worse: a massive depression, or runaway inflation". Now, I get that Argentina's political culture is broken and wasn't fixing this in a measured way (which was possible) so in the end they may look back at this and say it was worth it. But we're into lost generation shit here and with no guarantee that the institutions necessary for the maintainence of a modern economy make it out the other end intact.
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but when inflation is 300 fucking percent, you kinda do have do something drastic. i dunno if this was it, but something.
 
zeke said:
but when inflation is 300 fucking percent, you kinda do have do something drastic. i dunno if this was it, but something.
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Capital controls (or just ditch your currency and peg to a stable international currency like USD), centralized price controls, import/export controls, etc, etc. There are levels to pull that don't lead to a near 100% guarantee of a decade long financial depression that will likely cut the Argentinian economy down by half over the next decade from where it sits now (between Ireland and Sweden) down to a sub 300B economy (Between Kazakhstan and Peru).

There's lot of good examples of why depression is worst case scenario territory imo. Ukraine was poorer in 2014 than they were in 1989 because of the post soviet depression (lost 45% of GDP, poverty went up 1000%). You don't come back from that shit for generations. The only reason the US bounced back economically from their depression so "quickly" was the insane amount of capital (so, so much debt created and soaked up the savings of an entire generation) that got poured into everything for the war effort and post war restructuring of society. The textbook opposite of austerity.

Yeah, drastic shit was necessary but to an Austrian School hammer, every problem has an extremist free market solution nail. Sometimes you need some good ol fashioned lite socialism to get prices under control while you stabilize the currency.
 
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