Political Quotes

“Yes. And I think that you are right. Having the world's currency allows us--you know, many countries trade in dollars. You will go into marketplaces all around the world, and what they are actually exchanging is dollars. So as we have bought more goods than we have exported, we import more than we export, we paid for that in dollars. Some have described that as being able to export our inflation. People have also said: Well, the dollar isn't perfect. It is a fiat currency. It is being inflated. But everybody else is so bad that we are sort of the cleanest shirt in a closet full of dirty shirts. So, yes, I think being the reserve currency has allowed us to last longer, but there are immutable rules of economics that eventually catch up to a country, and I think we approach those. I don't think anybody can predict exactly when we get there, but I think we are approaching a time--and it may not be a gradual unraveling. You know, if you look back at the history of our marketplace, we have had these black swan events. We have had these events where the marketplace, in 7 or 8 days in our history, most of the losses have happened calamitously. Even in 2011, when the market went down, there was a debate. They said: Oh, it is because we risked the debt ceiling. Well, many of us thought that the marketplace went down at that time because we actually continued to borrow without reforming the process.”