You say "Correct", but Toast works the opposite of the person you're responding to. They charge the same fee regardless if it's a debit or credit card. They charge based on the network, and most debit cards in my experience use the Visa or Mastercard network. Yes, this is contrary to the Visa/MC terms, but I've never seen it enforced.
It’s not just community banks or credit unions. The cap is $10 billion in assets.
There’s a whole industry of mid-sized banks just below that which are offering their services as sponsor banks to fintechs that want to earn the orders of magnitudes higher interchange rates while still getting debit acceptance/less surcharges and being allowed to offer a debit product.
Hmmm. Aquire all these properties under the guise of reviving things for racing and oopsie it failed what ever shall we do with all these properties now? Oh yeah do what we do best – build data centers.
I'm saying bond prices would drop sharply if China tried to rapidly sell even 10% of its holdings.
When bond prices drop, US interest rates go up, which hurts the real US economy.
And when bond prices drop, that devalues the remaining 90% of China's holdings, hurting China too.
The Fed could stabilize the bond market by printing dollars to buy the bonds itself, but that would devalue the dollar and drive up inflation in the US. When China tries to repatriate that wealth, they must sell dollars and buy yuan, which would drive up the value of the yuan, driving up the cost of Chinese exports, hurting their manufacturing sector.
it doesn't sound like it from what you said. China appears to have the option to destroy the US economy by forfeiting much of the value of the US dollars they have, they don't have to buy yuan with it.
Both economies would suffer massive shockwaves, but the US has central bank tools to absorb the blow, while China destroys its own asset base with no way to recover the loss. They're not going to burn down their own house just to smoke out their neighbor.
Just Googling here: 10% of China's holdings would be $66B. Daily trading volume for US Treasuries is $1.2T.
The most the Fed has ever held on its balance sheet is $5.8T.
Maybe I missed a zero somewhere but China's sale of 10% of their holdings seems in isolation like an awfully manageable problem. A different discussion if there were a ton of other crazy stuff going on in the world economy and they just piled on, perhaps.
As someone who's very well informed on that corner of financial markets.. you're absolutely right. 66bn might cause some minor moves in yields but it's far from a disaster.
US 10y bond auctions are often >40bn in size, with shorter maturities well over that. The seller of this debt (China) wouldn't want to smash the market because they'd only be shooting themselves in the foot.
Point being that it's an easily digestible amount of debt.
As someone who's very well informed on that corner of financial markets, you probably realize that China controls much more than $660 billion of US Treasury securities.
I'm sure you also realize that when a large holder sells a significant stake of any asset, traders anticipate they will sell more in the future.
Example 1: Berkshire Hathaway selling $47 million of BYD and the market price dropping 8% the next day, wiping out $10 billion of market value.
Example 2: Musk selling 0.6% of his stake in Tesla, and the market price dropping 15% the next day, wiping out $187 billion in market value.
Example 3: UK government announcing a planned sale of 0.3% of above-ground gold, and the global gold price plunging 10% before the first auction.
> As someone who's very well informed on that corner of financial markets, you probably realize that China controls much more than $660 billion of US Treasury securities.
How much do they control? Please cite your sources.
I can find some information about "shadow holdings" (exciting!) held in Luxembourg and Belgium [0] but I cannot imagine those treasuries would add up to a multiple of what's officially on the books and held by the Chinese government and Chinese companies. Interesting thought, though.
The whole thing is a motte and bailey game. The largest of cloud companies might build a data center which is 1GW. There won't be 4000 of those and it won't be next to your house. A huge number of commercial office buildings already have a 100kW data center in them, and have for decades, without anyone having any reason to know or care. For those 4000 is certainly an underestimate.
If all the talk is true that something approximating human intelligence can be scaled simply by building more datacenters, absolutely, it will be the most desired commodity in the world surpassing all others.
> If all the talk is true that something approximating human intelligence can be scaled simply by building more datacenters.
How can an "approximation of human intelligence" be "scaled by building more datacenters"? That doesn't even make sense. You don't need more datacenters to demonstrate that you have an "approximation of human intelligence", all you need is a lab and at most 1 (one) datacenter. Only after you've demonstrated you know how to deliver the goods, you can think about scaling, retail and marketing.
The demand for the current "approximation" is out there for all to see, it's nothing like the "most desired commodity in the world", in fact, it needs huge inflationary subsidies in order to sustain some sort of demand-for-show.
Precisely, if we expect AI/LLM progress to continue as it currently is, then data centers seem like a sure fire bet. They will just print money if AI reached that level.
Relying on soil surveys at 5 acres is typically not advised. Soil samples will always yield best results. Your State Ag School usually will process them gratis or for little cost (they may ask to add the sample to a database). The more samples the better!
Former GIS guy here, I've modeled and mapped hundreds of rural jurisdictions so I'm familiar with what you are trying to accomplish. Not sure how comprehensive USDA soil surveys are these days as soil conditions can be hyper local (down to the feet).
Many of large ranch lands and farms are going to be listed exclusively by a certain broker which may require website scrapping at minimum and or heads up data entry at worst.
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