An observation on having your debt denominated in a currency you print

From Daniel Davies's D-squared Digest, April 20th:

A note on Modern Monetary Theory

Just to note that of course a theory should be tested against the real world, and that the real tests of a theory are in the extreme outcomes and corner cases.

I therefore note that, in respect of the Krugman/Galbraith/Baker/cast of thousands debate, that Zimbabwe exists as a country as well as a debating point, and that it does have domestic currency treasury bills, and that it is a perhaps startling fact that throughout the unorthodox policy measures of the last ten years, Zimbabwe has, in fact, never defaulted on its domestic currency sovereign obligations. So I score this one for MMT.

One sentence summary from Gavyn Davies of the FT: "Bernanke talks the dollar down".

Well, looks like American borrowing rates won't be going up any time soon. A good thing if you're still waiting to buying a house. US residential real estate doesn't appear to be recovering, and you'll still be able to get a mortgage at a good rate.

On the other hand, I clearly should have bought more loonies when I had the chance last year. And yuan, and Sing $, and...

Anyone looking to borrow cheap dollars has gotten yet another green light. Not surprisingly, equities and commodities both rose today. And nearly every other currency on the planet.

(no subject)

Delicious has been sold to AVOS. From the Delicious FAQ:

What will happen to my public and private bookmarks?

By agreeing to the AVOS terms of service, you will allow us to send your account information, bookmarks, and all the data associated with your Delicious account to AVOS when they re-launch Delicious. Your public and private bookmarks will be maintained as they are today. The information transferred would include:

Delicious username
Delicious password
Email address
First Name
Last Name
Bookmarks, Tags and Notes
Inbox items
Tag Bundles
Tag Descriptions
Network Members
Subscriptions
Blogpost jobs
Twitter Auth credentials (if supplied)

What if I don't opt-in to migrate my bookmarks to AVOS?

You will no longer be able to use Delicious or access your bookmarks after the transition is complete.

cme has recommended Freelish.us, from StatusNet, "the world's leading Open Source social software."

From http://status.net/2011/04/01/new-federated-social-bookmarks-service-freelish-us:

Freelish.us is a social bookmarking service, similar to dozens of other similar services.

You can import a bookmark file from delicious.com into your freelish.us account. You can use the bookmarklet to post new URLs to the service. And you can use the AtomPub API we introduced in StatusNet 0.9.7 to post ActivityStreams-encoded bookmarks to the service.

Most importantly, you can set up your own site. Freelish.us is built using StatusNet 0.9.7 with the Bookmark plugin enabled. The statusnet-freelishus theme works pretty nicely for bookmarks. If you set up your own site, you can follow people on Freelish.us (and other OStatus-enabled services), and they can follow you. That's what “federated” means.

Anyway, I haven't transferred my bookmarks yet, so I can't speak to functionality or user experience, but I do have an account, same name as on Dreamwidth and Twitter, but not the one on LJ. I figured I'd signal-boost.

ETA: I've now uploaded my bookmarks--I think--but I'm finding the documentation unsurprisingly sparse and unhelpful. I'm going to keep poking at it to see if it ends up being useful. More updates later if I can get it working.