The de minimas threshold allows for lots of things that would otherwise be difficult to document or not worth the effort, from grandma mailing a sweater for Christmas to getting a replacement part shipped directly.
I wonder how the accounting nets out when you consider quite a lot of the costs are likely billed internally for use of Amazon infrastructure. Charging market rate for AWS hosting, billing services, etc, could helpfully make a low margin profitable operation into a tax deductible money pit.
It helps that board members are often fellow CEOs or members of multiple other company boards. They have an incentive to negotiate high pay packages and shareholders in general get presented with a yes/no question
Houston is built mostly on swamp with a high water table and routine flooding. I doubt underground cabling would be significantly more reliable and would be much more expensive to install and maintain
More use? I'd challenge you to find that European freight is substantially diverted from rail to road. In most cases I'd suspect it's a matter of small or mixed loads over short distances, which in Europe might still be multinational. Frankly, for the kinds of loads that in the US would travel by rail freight, the alternative to rail wouldn't be air, but sea.
There are many reasons cited in the links I dug up for others, but among the various issue such as interoperability rail systems that are designed for passengers that impacted track design and train length. This prioritisation happened long ago.
These stories seem to always exaggerate the losses on these types of commercial properties. Inevitably, the buyer is paying off a big outstanding loan and possibly a tax bill, but the headline purchase amount is just the winning bid to pay for the privilege to settle the outstanding debt. No doubt the value of these properties struggling to find tenants is lower than it was, but not nearly what they're trying to show in these stories.
I haven't seen it mentioned about RTO yet, but I'm sure some managers really just want to be able to conduct certain conversations and behaviors in person, completely off the record. Working for these people would range in badness from being victimized to potential accusations of conspiracy.
You have to wonder where they're finding contractors to competently build these and maintain them. Electrify America has a bad reputation for offline and broken stations, and Tesla might not bid on a contract like this. It would be cool if they built state capacity to just have charging stations.
Servicing the debt is an entirely political act. If the US government wants to pay its bills, it does. The alternative is unlikely, but interesting-what if the US just says no? What enforcement mechanism is there? The biggest trade partner, biggest military, and cultural hegemon says "what are you gonna do about it?" and you do what?
This really is one of the most interesting questions.
Obviously, a loss of global prestige and reserve currency abandonment could be the result, but if there’s no other country to step in that has that prestige or offers a replacement…
What aee the requirements of debt to suppory a global order? Is it the rise of debt thats the issue or the loss of faith in the global order that that debt represents? People who understand that national debts are a necessary component of reserve currencies get the depth of this question.
> Obviously, a loss of global prestige and reserve currency abandonment could be the result, but if there’s no other country to step in that has that prestige or offers a replacement…
I don't think the role of the US dolar as a reserve currency is put into question with a hypothetical default.
The typical impact of a default is that lenders are stiffed out of the money they lended. Some might go bankrupt as a result, but the only consequence to the US government is a hypothetical inability to get further loans at lower rates. This might be problematic for the US if the US federal government still runs a deficit.
Now, there is the question of what would this "inability" mean.
When Greece defaulted on its sovereign debt, their credit rating tanked and the global financial market hiked interest rates for Greek debt to the point they reached double digits. That lead the Greek government to beg the EU and IMF for emergency loans, which were accompanied by fiscal policy changes. I doubt the US would follow a similar pattern, mainly because the IMF does not have funds of this hypothetical magnitude.
> I don't think the role of the US dolar as a reserve currency is put into question with a hypothetical default.
Why would it not ? Wasn't that how the previous reserve currencies ended ? Are there many examples of relatively as bad defaults that did not result in such an end ?
Especially when the lenders first to be screwed here are (or at least were in 2020) Japan and China.
He doesn't seem to recognize that the government debt is backed by not only the entire productive capacity of the nation, but also the willingness of creditors to tank the world denominated currency. It's possible that some political fights could temporarily sway the market but it would take a broader societal collapse to actually kill the dollar.
People can meet anywhere anytime in private and trade whatever they want and negotiate and that determines the price. And this can easily happen in any country not controlled by the US.
So the US military opinion on what the doller should be worth is pretty much irrelevant.
