Listening carefully doesn't just avoid misunderstandings. It also bolsters bonds during arguments. 5 studies: Even if people don’t find common ground, when they feel heard, they leave feeling more connected, capable, and optimistic. Agreement is not a prerequisite for respect.
In QE, the Treasury issued long-term bonds. The Fed bought up the long bonds, issued overnight debt, and passed the interest difference back to the Treasury. In the end, it is just as if the Treasury issued overnight debt in the first place.
The winner would then be the AIs, not us. That is not to say that the China issue is not real, hence the export controls and attempted international agreement.
Couple this book with Edward Chancellor's also excellent The Price of Time: The Real Story of Interest, published in 2022, and you can learn most of what you need to think intelligently about bonds.
However, these LLM reasoners that generate informal reasoning in natural language are fundamentally limited by the lack of precise, machine-checkable semantics, making their outputs prone to hallucinations [Huang et al., 2025b] and precluding autonomous verification, a prerequisite for tackling open-ended mathematical research.
I don't think there's any real prospect of a meaningful peace agreement. I think it's almost impossible. I think the best you can hope for at this point is, at some point the shooting stops, you have a ceasefire, and then you have a frozen conflict. And that frozen conflict will not be highly stable.
This is precisely the role the central bank can play. By announcing that it stands ready to buy the bonds that investors want to sell at the price associated with the low interest rate, and credibly indicating that it has deep enough pockets to buy whatever is needed, it can eliminate the bad equilibrium.
Governments have not been bailed out by their central banks. As I discussed earlier, central bank intervention does not reduce the overall liabilities of the consolidated government, just their composition. And it does not automatically lead to more inflation: It increases the size of the balance sheet of the central bank, but it does not increase the size of the non-interest-paying money stock.
The proposition is that the cancellation of the bonds held by the central bank would decrease the amount of interest payments and thus the debt service of governments. And indeed, it would. But it would have another effect—namely, to decrease the revenues of the central bank and thus the profits that the central bank turns in to the government. This second effect would be exactly of the same size as the first, and the net effect on the government budget constraint would be equal to zero.
I do not sign CLAs and I think they’re a harmful practice for this very reason. Asking a contributor to sign them is a slap in the face to the good will which led them to make a contribution in the first place.
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