Just a perspective to share from someone trying to buy property for a small business(since most people think about it from a residential POV).
Unlike residential mortgages, corporate loans are not fixed interest rates. They are all adjustable. What in 2020 seems financially sound, becomes impossible a few years later.
I can't imagine how other companies do this, do you just make sure your business can handle 12% interest rates just incase a politician decides to give away free money for a few years?
I come from (real) engineering, so everything is just math to me. However the adjustable interest rates is quite a wrench. Do I need to assume a 15% fed reserve interest rate + the 2-4% the bank piles on? Heck, 15% might be low, you never know.
I imagine that all businesses would benefit from having some long term certainty. Maybe mid/large companies can raise money or get fixed loans, but I'm at the point where I need to use my feelings(ewwww) to make a decision.
Can you hedge against it with interest rate swaps? It seems interest rate risk is probably one of the more manageable risks of a small business that is fundamentally dependent on other people's money - how do you know it's going to succeed in the first place even if rates don't increase?
> Do I need to assume a 15% fed reserve interest rate + the 2-4% the bank piles on? Heck, 15% might be low, you never know.
If you do make this assumption, then your present value of the real estate will ensure you always get outbid by someone with looser expectations. The conservatism of the market is set at the ability to leverage by the lunatics at the margin.
> Unlike residential mortgages, corporate loans are not fixed interest rates. They are all adjustable. What in 2020 seems financially sound, becomes impossible a few years later.
> I can't imagine how other companies do this, do you just make sure your business can handle 12% interest rates just incase a politician decides to give away free money for a few years?
There's probably a larger area of acceptable risk to take for a business loan vs a personal loan, IMHO; but if it's a business loan that you're also personally liable for, that's different. Businesses fail all of the time, and it's acceptable. You also have to consider what leverage the borrower has against the lender. If your business can't pay the loan, will the lender be able to find a buyer if they foreclose? If not, they may be likely to let a default slide. I've heard many stories of commercial landlords that let businesses stay rent-free for years because they couldn't attract a new tenant for the space, and it was better to have it occupied and active than empty. I've never heard of residential landlords letting tenants stay for years rent free unless required to or some other special circumstance.
> I imagine that all businesses would benefit from having some long term certainty
Individuals, too: the money you contributed to social security may be gone when you need it, so good luck planning your future. Or maybe you won't get anything until you're 80. Or maybe you'll get half of it. Or it'll be taxed to death.
So for the sake of planning, the common advice to younger workers is to assume you'll get nothing. Get back to work.
There are certain risks that aren't worth hedging in a stable country like the US. E.g. you don't hedge treasury bond defaults because in the unlikely event that happens, your money is probably worthless anyway and you would rather have food and guns.
A 15% interest rate is so high that even if you managed to protect your financing with a hedge, it might be unlikely you have solvent customers anymore.
Fun fact'! 30-year fixed rate mortgages is a uniquely American thing. Most other countries are adjustable rate mortgages, even for boring primary residential loans.
Like other cases where businesses focus on their core competency, I think many businesses just rent and let the professional landlords worry about such things. Unless your business is really chiefly a real estate play, like say those self-storage companies that buy property in far-flung suburbs, run a low-investment business for a few decades and then sell the property when sprawl has driven up land values.
This shows a level of confidence in the banking sector that I find questionable. Risks associated with raising bond interest rates were one of largest factors in the recent bank failures. Surely more bank failures would be seen as worse for the economy than inflation.
If more, larger banks fail in the next twelve months then the Federal Reserve will be sheepish about raising interest rates for the next hundred years. In inflation stays high then it seems likely the Federal Reserve will keep pushing those interest rates higher and higher until something breaks and we enter crisis mode.
Personally, I'd like to see Congress take more action to reduce inflation. Ideally I think the answer is some combination of raising taxes and reducing federal spending, to start to decrease the amount of cashflow. I think some activity on their front can have an impact without introducing the same types of banking risks associated with raising interest rates, and we'll see better results with less negative impact. Of course, given the contents of the Inflation Reduction Act this seems unlikely. The legislative and executive branches seem content to leave inflation to the Federal Reserve, as it absolves them of responsibility.
> "...the Federal Reserve will keep pushing those interest rates higher and higher..."
They really can't raise interest rates much above 5%, this follows straightforwardly from observing how much of the national budget is consumed by debt service as a function of the interest rate. (Higher rate = larger fraction of budget allocated to debt service, obviously.)
If they go above five-ish percent, this implies that they'll need to either A) raise taxes to a level that would likely inspire mutiny, B) greatly reduce borderline-impossible-to-cut parts of the budget such as the military industrial complex + welfare spending broadly construed, C) increase productivity by a lot, D) monetize the debt or E) default on the debt.
Probably they will attempt to pick F) all of these, in varying degrees, though obviously some are easier to implement than others. Anyway it is very unlikely that we will see rates much above 5% in the foreseeable future.
Inflation costs more than bank failures. The Fed can fix bank failures by providing liquidity on demand - without any limit, theoretically. But unless they tighten rates, inflation will just grow and make future tightening more urgent and less easy to control.
What banking sector? I think until the AT1 bond lawsuit gets resolved with a win for the bond holders, all but the biggest banks have serious liquidity issues. There is not going to be a sector but a few chosen survivor banks and some lucky ones.
Private banks are the ones that "print" the money -- common misconception on who does. Fed is saying "well someone needs to lose the money or I will keep increasing rates (until I break the game)" while FDIC and executive branch are saying "nobody will lose any money."
Who do you think is going to win this game of chicken?
We need actions at the speed of "light" compared to Congress speed. That is the reason Congress does not directly handle these issues but a third party, the Federal Reserve, does.
We are practically waiting for the real estate sector to collapse, commercial first, and that money to disappear right now.
> This shows a level of confidence in the banking sector that I find questionable.
No, it doesn't.
Protecting the banking sector isn't part of the monetary policy setting mandate.
> Risks associated with raising bond interest rates were one of largest factors in the recent bank failures. Surely more bank failures would be seen as worse for the economy than inflation.
No, in terms of the Fed mandate, they are not. More business failures, including of banks, are a normal and expected cost of contractionary monetary policy.
> If more, larger banks fail in the next twelve months then the Federal Reserve will be sheepish about raising interest rates for the next hundred years.
They weren’t for the next hundred years after the wave of major banks that failed or needed intervention to avoid failure in the 2007 crisis, obviously, or after the huge number of bank failures during the high rate regime in the 1980s, so...probably not.
> In inflation stays high then it seems likely the Federal Reserve will keep pushing those interest rates higher and higher until something breaks and we enter crisis mode.
Surez if inflation (which is already low but has not stayed that way for as long as the Fed would like) were to bounce back up so the 12-month trailing rate stayed high rather than continuing to settle back to normal, that would be the Fed response. No reason to think that’s likely.
> Personally, I'd like to see Congress take more action to reduce inflation
That, this late in the game, would be a very good way to guarantee an overshoot the opposite way we just did, which would be worse than leaving the foot on the economic gas too long was.
Except the US treasury and the Fed gave all US banks a 1yr blank check to get their act together, if rising rates really are causing them trouble. This was during the SVB crash. So no, banks should not fail because of rising rates, if they don't have idiots in charge. Oh wait, SVB failed specifically because they had idiots in charge. Good thing they all got fired. How many more idiots are in charge of banks? The FDIC will find out for us in about a year I'm betting.
The Fed probably believes that any banking sector issues related to interest rate risk are adequately addressed by the Bank Term Funding Program which allows banks to gradually get past their low interest rate problems and that any banks with assets that can’t take advantage of this program are mismanaged and deserve to fail. And they’re probably not wrong since durational risk arbitrage is literally the core business model of a bank.
Congress isn't incentivized to fix inflation. On the contrary, stats are concocted from cherry picked consumer goods to show current inflation at lower levels than what is reflected in reality and the specific goods vary depending on their cost at the time stats are concocted. Assets also tend to accumulate value when inflation rises, and so congresspeople know this and accumulate assets that will do so.
> Surely more bank failures would be seen as worse for the economy than inflation.
I disagree with this. Also keep in mind that the Fed has a dual mandate (price stability and maximum employment); they aren't guardians of the overall economy nor are the responsible for ensuring that banks don't fail.
> Personally, I'd like to see Congress take more action to reduce inflation.
Lots of smoke in the comments here. The Fed is doing what needs to create relative stability. Uncomfortable, but real. Demand is outstripping supply and prices are going up. The least painful option is raising interest rates. Alternatives are hyperinflation, (very bad), or various price fixing schemes (which have literally never worked despite many attempts and are even worse in the ultimate outcomes). There are lots of reasons why this is happening, and none of them are related to a "fake economy:"
People and businesses came out of lockdown with saved money and basically free loans burning holes in their pocket which caused a spike in demand (Least important, probably no longer an issue)
Businesses came out of lockdown with a diminished staff and a ton of new uncertainty (much more important, takes a while to recover for some businesses that are planning production multiple YEARS in advance).
Deglobalization/ U.S. national re-industrialization, started by Trump, continued with Biden, which will increase prices on pretty much everything. This is both a reasonable response to the issue, and makes the issue worse in the short term.
There's a hot war with a major energy producer, Russia, which will increase prices for every product where energy is an input (almost every product).
The biggest manufacturer in the world, China, has randomly been shutting down factories and whole metropolises for weeks at a time for the last several years. We just got a correction in this regard, but it will take time for the supply side of the equation to ramp back up, especially given all of the moving parts and uncertainty outlined above.
Bottom line - lean supply chains function well when everything is stable for a longish period of time and it looks like it will continue to be for a longish period of time. In unstable/uncertain environments, supply chains break down, and supply can't keep up with demand, and the government can't keep handing out free money without causing prices to hyperinflate.
The least bad option would be to raise taxes. If the problem is too much money, directly removing the money from the system is the solution. Taxes can be precisely targeted and work quickly. Call it a "windfall tax" for political cover, but given that it would have to be large to be effective, it would be more than that. The Inflation Reduction Act was a good start, but it only raised taxes by $700B.
The next least bad option would be to reduce spending. It'd be slower to act, can't be targeted as easily as increased taxes and there's no possible way to reduce spending by the trillions necessary to have an effect on inflation.
Raising rates is a very poor instrument for fixing supply-driven inflation. Even if it forces suppliers to temporarily lower their prices, as soon as rates are lowered again and economic activity picks back up and demand returns, inflation will return with a vengeance too. Destroying demand does nothing to fix the supply chain problems behind current inflation (which you already mentioned: war, energy, deglobalisation, china lockdowns etc). It’s a pointless, painful exercise and it’s probably being done by the fed only to maintain the appearance of fulfilling their expected role. The truth is the fed is powerless and cannot fix the problem.
Lots of uncertainty in the press conference following the interest rate announcement. Seems like the Fed is preparing for the possibility of more restrictive actions in the future, but is waiting for more data to see if such actions are needed. I expect the market to place a lot more weight on data released over the next few weeks.
aka they might have to do 1 or 2 .25bps hikes within the next 6-12 months that originally weren’t telegraphed expectation wise, so stock market will need to moderately correct to the new balance of “expected versus actual”?
This whole interest rate hike exercise and its obvious effects on various markets has really made the economy seem fake to me. How can one government committee have so much arbitrary decision making power over how hundreds of millions conduct business in this country? It’s extremely demotivating.
The arbitrary centrally-planned foundation of the economy has been clear to those paying attention on the way down, as rates were repeatedly lowered further and further over decades for one political purpose or another. What has surprised me is that the Fed did end up having the will to raise rates a decent amount.
So it seems the Fed actually has been following their technocratic mandate, just with horribly broken criteria based around consumer price inflation - horribly broken because the real price of manufactured goods should have been dropping significantly due to offshoring and technological progress, but the Fed's feedback loop created enough new money so they couldn't (hence the ever-growing asset bubble).
As a libertarian student of Austrian economics, seeing this play out is actually warming me up to Modern Monetary Theory - at least it means the newly created money gets directed to deliberate purposes (like sorely needed infrastructure), rather than just handed to banks in a mostly undirected manner while feigning austerity for everyone else.
The fed has a dual mandate (Powell only repeats this 20-30 times during each press conference). Stable prices (2% inflation) and maximum employment.
That dual mandate is what dictates policy. The recent string of rate hikes are not arbitrary, they are because of the surge in inflation flowing the extreme policies the fed took on the other end when unemployment was high during the pandemic.
If anything the case to be made is that the fed went overboard with its QE during the pandemic, but even then its a bit of "hindsight is 20/20". I think everyone can agree that had this pandemic struck in 2000, even 2010 instead of 2020, the economic impact would have been dramatically greater than it was.
All these rate hikes has made me understand how deeply manipulated the economy is. All these scary stories about the old left going to mess with the market ...
It seems to me that the FED arbitrarily can manipulate the lowest return on money invested that is possible to get away with aswell as the highest rate you can expect to get on your money by some opaque banker only interest system.
Like, how is printing money and givinging it to the poor any worse. Both are manipulation.
The US have maybe a few months to completely undo their stupid sanctions on the Russians and return their money or the de-dollarizarion movement will keep gaining steam and those bank failures will look like children’s play.
There’s no way the USA can survive as a world power if they keep stupidly weaponizing the dollar and weakening its status as the world currency. How do people think we will keep our standards of living if we don’t have the world’s currency to allow us to keep our prosperity by having this massive trade deficit?
Could they be more effective? Certainly. Should they be going much further and actually crippling Putin? Yes. Does Putin deserve to get his teeth kicked in for the shit he's pulling in Ukraine? Absolutely. Should Putin's oligarchic buddies get their fortunes wiped out because of Putin's stupid actions? Certainly.
It's not "The West's" fault that Russia has not modernized at all since the fall of the USSR, nor is it their fault that Russia decided to hand the keys to the kingdom over to a former KGB operative, and keep handing him the keys every chance they got. NATO was essentially created for situations like this - because the powers-that-be knew Russia would try to expand its territory every chance it got.
A de-dollariztion and a move to what? Yuan? Ruble? Bitcoin?
Sure countries might be unhappy with the dollar as of late, but there really is no serious competitor. It's like being upset with the Ritz and threatening them with moving your stay to the Comfort Inn.
You raise a valid point so don't know why you're being downvoted. A lot of my investors reallocated their portfolios when SVB happened to minimize risk due to dollar volatility. I think perhaps this runs counter to the mainstream woke narratives whenever russia comes up
[+] [-] hospitalJail|2 years ago|reply
Unlike residential mortgages, corporate loans are not fixed interest rates. They are all adjustable. What in 2020 seems financially sound, becomes impossible a few years later.
I can't imagine how other companies do this, do you just make sure your business can handle 12% interest rates just incase a politician decides to give away free money for a few years?
I come from (real) engineering, so everything is just math to me. However the adjustable interest rates is quite a wrench. Do I need to assume a 15% fed reserve interest rate + the 2-4% the bank piles on? Heck, 15% might be low, you never know.
I imagine that all businesses would benefit from having some long term certainty. Maybe mid/large companies can raise money or get fixed loans, but I'm at the point where I need to use my feelings(ewwww) to make a decision.
[+] [-] NationalPark|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] voisin|2 years ago|reply
If you do make this assumption, then your present value of the real estate will ensure you always get outbid by someone with looser expectations. The conservatism of the market is set at the ability to leverage by the lunatics at the margin.
[+] [-] toast0|2 years ago|reply
> I can't imagine how other companies do this, do you just make sure your business can handle 12% interest rates just incase a politician decides to give away free money for a few years?
There's probably a larger area of acceptable risk to take for a business loan vs a personal loan, IMHO; but if it's a business loan that you're also personally liable for, that's different. Businesses fail all of the time, and it's acceptable. You also have to consider what leverage the borrower has against the lender. If your business can't pay the loan, will the lender be able to find a buyer if they foreclose? If not, they may be likely to let a default slide. I've heard many stories of commercial landlords that let businesses stay rent-free for years because they couldn't attract a new tenant for the space, and it was better to have it occupied and active than empty. I've never heard of residential landlords letting tenants stay for years rent free unless required to or some other special circumstance.
[+] [-] thunky|2 years ago|reply
Individuals, too: the money you contributed to social security may be gone when you need it, so good luck planning your future. Or maybe you won't get anything until you're 80. Or maybe you'll get half of it. Or it'll be taxed to death.
So for the sake of planning, the common advice to younger workers is to assume you'll get nothing. Get back to work.
[+] [-] singron|2 years ago|reply
A 15% interest rate is so high that even if you managed to protect your financing with a hedge, it might be unlikely you have solvent customers anymore.
[+] [-] zamnos|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lastofthemojito|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ur-whale|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] xnx|2 years ago|reply
High interest rates = "giving away free money"?
I thought low interest rates was giving away money?
[+] [-] curiousllama|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] htag|2 years ago|reply
If more, larger banks fail in the next twelve months then the Federal Reserve will be sheepish about raising interest rates for the next hundred years. In inflation stays high then it seems likely the Federal Reserve will keep pushing those interest rates higher and higher until something breaks and we enter crisis mode.
Personally, I'd like to see Congress take more action to reduce inflation. Ideally I think the answer is some combination of raising taxes and reducing federal spending, to start to decrease the amount of cashflow. I think some activity on their front can have an impact without introducing the same types of banking risks associated with raising interest rates, and we'll see better results with less negative impact. Of course, given the contents of the Inflation Reduction Act this seems unlikely. The legislative and executive branches seem content to leave inflation to the Federal Reserve, as it absolves them of responsibility.
[+] [-] avn2109|2 years ago|reply
They really can't raise interest rates much above 5%, this follows straightforwardly from observing how much of the national budget is consumed by debt service as a function of the interest rate. (Higher rate = larger fraction of budget allocated to debt service, obviously.)
If they go above five-ish percent, this implies that they'll need to either A) raise taxes to a level that would likely inspire mutiny, B) greatly reduce borderline-impossible-to-cut parts of the budget such as the military industrial complex + welfare spending broadly construed, C) increase productivity by a lot, D) monetize the debt or E) default on the debt.
Probably they will attempt to pick F) all of these, in varying degrees, though obviously some are easier to implement than others. Anyway it is very unlikely that we will see rates much above 5% in the foreseeable future.
[+] [-] ttul|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] eftychis|2 years ago|reply
Private banks are the ones that "print" the money -- common misconception on who does. Fed is saying "well someone needs to lose the money or I will keep increasing rates (until I break the game)" while FDIC and executive branch are saying "nobody will lose any money."
Who do you think is going to win this game of chicken?
We need actions at the speed of "light" compared to Congress speed. That is the reason Congress does not directly handle these issues but a third party, the Federal Reserve, does.
We are practically waiting for the real estate sector to collapse, commercial first, and that money to disappear right now.
[+] [-] dragonwriter|2 years ago|reply
No, it doesn't.
Protecting the banking sector isn't part of the monetary policy setting mandate.
> Risks associated with raising bond interest rates were one of largest factors in the recent bank failures. Surely more bank failures would be seen as worse for the economy than inflation.
No, in terms of the Fed mandate, they are not. More business failures, including of banks, are a normal and expected cost of contractionary monetary policy.
> If more, larger banks fail in the next twelve months then the Federal Reserve will be sheepish about raising interest rates for the next hundred years.
They weren’t for the next hundred years after the wave of major banks that failed or needed intervention to avoid failure in the 2007 crisis, obviously, or after the huge number of bank failures during the high rate regime in the 1980s, so...probably not.
> In inflation stays high then it seems likely the Federal Reserve will keep pushing those interest rates higher and higher until something breaks and we enter crisis mode.
Surez if inflation (which is already low but has not stayed that way for as long as the Fed would like) were to bounce back up so the 12-month trailing rate stayed high rather than continuing to settle back to normal, that would be the Fed response. No reason to think that’s likely.
> Personally, I'd like to see Congress take more action to reduce inflation
That, this late in the game, would be a very good way to guarantee an overshoot the opposite way we just did, which would be worse than leaving the foot on the economic gas too long was.
[+] [-] zie|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] abduhl|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] a_subsystem|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Yeahsureok|2 years ago|reply
Using fiscal policy for inflation targeting is crude and horrendously slow.
[+] [-] TinyRick|2 years ago|reply
I disagree with this. Also keep in mind that the Fed has a dual mandate (price stability and maximum employment); they aren't guardians of the overall economy nor are the responsible for ensuring that banks don't fail.
> Personally, I'd like to see Congress take more action to reduce inflation.
100% agree
[+] [-] tsjackson|2 years ago|reply
People and businesses came out of lockdown with saved money and basically free loans burning holes in their pocket which caused a spike in demand (Least important, probably no longer an issue)
Businesses came out of lockdown with a diminished staff and a ton of new uncertainty (much more important, takes a while to recover for some businesses that are planning production multiple YEARS in advance).
Deglobalization/ U.S. national re-industrialization, started by Trump, continued with Biden, which will increase prices on pretty much everything. This is both a reasonable response to the issue, and makes the issue worse in the short term.
There's a hot war with a major energy producer, Russia, which will increase prices for every product where energy is an input (almost every product).
The biggest manufacturer in the world, China, has randomly been shutting down factories and whole metropolises for weeks at a time for the last several years. We just got a correction in this regard, but it will take time for the supply side of the equation to ramp back up, especially given all of the moving parts and uncertainty outlined above.
Bottom line - lean supply chains function well when everything is stable for a longish period of time and it looks like it will continue to be for a longish period of time. In unstable/uncertain environments, supply chains break down, and supply can't keep up with demand, and the government can't keep handing out free money without causing prices to hyperinflate.
[+] [-] bryanlarsen|2 years ago|reply
The next least bad option would be to reduce spending. It'd be slower to act, can't be targeted as easily as increased taxes and there's no possible way to reduce spending by the trillions necessary to have an effect on inflation.
[+] [-] xk_id|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rightbyte|2 years ago|reply
Why is this taken as a fact everywhere. Surely, interest rates is a zero sum game?
I honestly don't understand.
[+] [-] TinyRick|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] MuffinFlavored|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pfannkuchen|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] blitzar|2 years ago|reply
The period of 10 years where rates were 0%+/- with 2-3++% inflation was the fake economy 5% rates with 5% inflation is the real world.
[+] [-] standyro|2 years ago|reply
To me, anyway, it's more calming. Haha.
[+] [-] mindslight|2 years ago|reply
So it seems the Fed actually has been following their technocratic mandate, just with horribly broken criteria based around consumer price inflation - horribly broken because the real price of manufactured goods should have been dropping significantly due to offshoring and technological progress, but the Fed's feedback loop created enough new money so they couldn't (hence the ever-growing asset bubble).
As a libertarian student of Austrian economics, seeing this play out is actually warming me up to Modern Monetary Theory - at least it means the newly created money gets directed to deliberate purposes (like sorely needed infrastructure), rather than just handed to banks in a mostly undirected manner while feigning austerity for everyone else.
[+] [-] Workaccount2|2 years ago|reply
That dual mandate is what dictates policy. The recent string of rate hikes are not arbitrary, they are because of the surge in inflation flowing the extreme policies the fed took on the other end when unemployment was high during the pandemic.
If anything the case to be made is that the fed went overboard with its QE during the pandemic, but even then its a bit of "hindsight is 20/20". I think everyone can agree that had this pandemic struck in 2000, even 2010 instead of 2020, the economic impact would have been dramatically greater than it was.
[+] [-] brianwawok|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] phone8675309|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rightbyte|2 years ago|reply
It seems to me that the FED arbitrarily can manipulate the lowest return on money invested that is possible to get away with aswell as the highest rate you can expect to get on your money by some opaque banker only interest system.
Like, how is printing money and givinging it to the poor any worse. Both are manipulation.
[+] [-] babelthuap|2 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] elzbardico|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ElectricalUnion|2 years ago|reply
Expecting such short term strong and worldwide forgetfulness is a deeply irrational line of thought.
[+] [-] NickC25|2 years ago|reply
Could they be more effective? Certainly. Should they be going much further and actually crippling Putin? Yes. Does Putin deserve to get his teeth kicked in for the shit he's pulling in Ukraine? Absolutely. Should Putin's oligarchic buddies get their fortunes wiped out because of Putin's stupid actions? Certainly.
It's not "The West's" fault that Russia has not modernized at all since the fall of the USSR, nor is it their fault that Russia decided to hand the keys to the kingdom over to a former KGB operative, and keep handing him the keys every chance they got. NATO was essentially created for situations like this - because the powers-that-be knew Russia would try to expand its territory every chance it got.
[+] [-] Workaccount2|2 years ago|reply
Sure countries might be unhappy with the dollar as of late, but there really is no serious competitor. It's like being upset with the Ritz and threatening them with moving your stay to the Comfort Inn.
[+] [-] uptownfunk|2 years ago|reply