It was done for 2 reasons and planned out by Paul Volcker, and there is a speech to go with it if someone can find it.
1) USD reserves allow us to import more value than we export so it offers a better standard of life for the consumer than otherwise.
2) It allows us to have a bigger consumer market than we would otherwise have and incentive for countries to partner with us to sell their stuff to. If you've lived outside the US you know every business wants to sell their stuff here either as #1 or just after their home market.
Under those purposes it seems to have worked very well. Of course theres the risks of crashes along with it too.
It's odd how everyone here has such an odd opinion. It's best to let what be be and regulate it asap. The outright ban just means we'll fall behind, as usual with everything.
On every EU-related article there's always someone commenting about how we "fall behind"... but what did we actually lose out on due to regulation?
Most US-originated tech we widely use today (operating systems, hardware) is US-originated because they were the first to come up with it may decades ago (before EU regulation was a "problem") and it doesn't make sense to reinvent the wheel, and are now using their monopoly power and network effects to prevent new players entering the market (Apple with iMessage for example).
I don't see new tech we missed out on in the last decade because of regulation, so could you please elaborate with some examples?
> Looks like they'll still be on coal when most of the world will be moving off it.
That's only true if most of the coal-using world excludes the 2.7 billion people living in China and India, neither of which have any plans to phase out coal at all. The US is also only gradually phasing out coal, it'll still be a major coal energy producer 20 years from now (probably 15% of its power base at that point).
China is very aggressively expanding its coal use - despite using as much coal as the rest of the world combined already. It's presently adding more new coal generation than exists in the entire EU.
That is true but I often see this used as a justification to not cut CO2 emissions because the "largest" emitters are growing their emissions. However, it doesn't make sense in terms of fairness because if you only look at current emissions you will not see the whole picture. When talking about fairness you always want to consider the cumulative CO2 [0] emissions that a country has emitted over it's existence and in those charts China is still a relatively small player despite having 1.3 billion people. Roughly 14% of the emissions in China are caused during the manufacturing of exported goods. The country is investing in electric mobility and renewable energy as much as it can. The only thing you can do to prevent an increase in CO2 emissions in China is to invent new technology that reduces CO2 emissions in a cost effective way. That won't happen if you just stick your head in the sand and continue defending obsolete technology.
> China is very aggressively expanding its coal use - despite using as much coal as the rest of the world combined already. It's presently adding more new coal generation than exists in the entire EU.
That's today, given the pace China works at they could easily commit to phasing out coal by 2037 and mean it too. They've already started planning for moving on from it. It's also entirely likely they could have less coal use (excluding steel and industrial uses) than from power stations than Germany in 2037 (1 year before Germany commits to phase it out)
While Australia is insignificant on its own. Its per person contribution is far above average. And since slot of people want to live the developed lifestyle like that of Australia the problem is it offers the excuse to being scaled up in other aspiring countries.
Additionally Australia actively dismantles action amongst other countries. Your comment comes off as knowing the pond in the ocean of the problem. It also exports coal on a gigantic scale, read top of the world so other countries do her polluting.
1) USD reserves allow us to import more value than we export so it offers a better standard of life for the consumer than otherwise.
2) It allows us to have a bigger consumer market than we would otherwise have and incentive for countries to partner with us to sell their stuff to. If you've lived outside the US you know every business wants to sell their stuff here either as #1 or just after their home market.
Under those purposes it seems to have worked very well. Of course theres the risks of crashes along with it too.