
Taiwan remains world's fifth biggest creditor at end of 2018 - Ultramanoid
http://focustaiwan.tw/news/aeco/201906150010.aspx
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batsy71
The NIIP (Net International Investment Position) measures whether a country is
net debtor vs net creditor.

This wikipedia list from 2017:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Net_international_investment_p...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Net_international_investment_position)

has some interesting trends:

1) US is far down below in the list as a net debtor country with the NIIP
being 43.4% of its GDP

2) Many erstwhile developing countries like China, India, Nigeria are slowly
getting closer to the 0 mark twards net creditor status

3) Venezuela is a net creditor country with NIIP beign 30.5% of the GDP. How
does that work for a country that's internally collapsing? Is it from
historical oil lending deals to other countries?

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imgabe
Is it necessarily a bad thing to be a net debtor? Generally when a business or
country borrows money it's because they can put it to some productive use that
generates a greater return than the cost of borrowing. If the US is borrowing
money, it means that it's making productive use of other countries' assets and
getting return from those assets that the other countries are not. This should
be a good thing (for the US).

People tend to react to news about national debt like it's their credit card
bill that they ran up on takeout food and flatscreen TVs. It's not really the
same thing.

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achingtooth
You're assuming we're maximizing the productivity on our debt. I would say the
US is spending money on the government equivalent of takeout food and
flatscreen TVs.

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astrange
4K TVs are incredibly cheap yet good quality these days, and it's not like you
need more than one.

~~~
achingtooth
That wasn't really my point, my point was that we take on enormous debt and we
spend it on things that aren't the best. Why don't we spend more on
infrastructure, research, investing in clean energy, etc? I understand that we
need a military to protect our position in the world, but I'm not sure $750
billion dollars per year is needed. Sure some of that is spent on research,
but I think there are more efficient ways to spend the money.

~~~
astrange
Well, because everyone in the US has brain damage from inhaling leaded
gasoline in the 80s, and so they're stuck in 1992 and think all government
policy means bombing countries in the Middle East while ignoring Asia, Africa
and their own country.

