The US is on the brink of a debt disaster, spiraling into $33 trillion of debt. That is over 180% of GDP.
The cause?
Skyrocketing government spending matched with insufficient tax revenues, leading to ever-deepening deficits.
The US Treasury is now low on credit and out of time.
Interest payments on this colossal debt have doubled since 2020, pushing the government into a corner. The Federal Reserve’s 2023 decisions to raise rates add to the turmoil, and the US Treasury is running out of debt buyers. A recent Treasury auction turned chaotic, revealing a global decline in appetite for US debt.
Our guest contributor asks the question of the hour: Are the chickens coming home to roost for the US Treasury?
The Federal Reserve and the US government create inflation and then blame everybody else.
President Joe Biden recently finger-pointed at “greedy corporations,” saying they need to “lower prices” now that inflation come down. Whether he is really that ignorant or just lying, Biden’s comments serve a purpose. As Ron Paul put it, they gaslight the American public into thinking price inflation is rooted in the actions of private individuals and not the fiat money system.
October CPI coming in cooler than expected ramped up expectations that the Federal Reserve is at the end of its inflation fight. In fact, many analysts now expect the Fed to begin cutting interest rates in 2024.
Looking at the bigger picture, inflation’s apparent retreat boosted mainstream belief that the economy will glide to a “soft landing.” With a lot of economic data weakening, the markets anticipate that the Fed will proactively cut rates to preempt a recession and prevent a crash landing. The thinking is as soon as it sees the economy coming in for a landing, it’s going to cut rates to ensure that landing is soft.
President Joe Biden is selling the latest proposal to send military aid to Israel and Ukraine as an economic stimulus plan. But this notion that spending money for somebody else’s war somehow boosts the American economy is rooted in a pervasive economic fallacy.
When you boil it all down, Biden is basically saying that the spending isn’t really foreign aid. It’s corporate welfare.
Ron Paul asks the operative question: should that make us feel better?
There is a $33.7 trillion elephant in the living room.
I’m referring to the massive national debt.
It’s pretty amazing that we have this massive animal sitting right in the middle of everything and most people are just walking around it as if it isn’t there.
The House recently ousted House Speaker Kevin McCarthy in the wake of the continuing resolution to keep spending money and avoid a government shutdown. Dissatisfied Republicans frustrated with the GOP’s unwillingness to address the federal spending problem banded together with Democrats to send McCarthy packing.
While the outcome might be politically satisfying to some, it’s not going to solve the underlying problem.
The national debt recently blew past $33 trillion. And yet with the exception of a few intransigent Republicans, there is virtually no discussion about reining in spending.
Congress managed to avoid a government shutdown by passing a continuing resolution that did very little to address spending. But as Ron Paul points out, there was a small victory in the CR that could bode well for the future.
The Federal Reserve has pushed interest rates to over 5%. At the most recent FOMC meeting, it indicated that it may have to hold rates higher for longer. But the mainstream remains unconcerned. The narrative is that the Fed has successfully raised rates to fight inflation and is now guiding the economy to a “soft landing.”
In a nutshell, the mainstream financial media seems convinced the US economy has dodged a recession. Meanwhile, the average American seems less than convinced.
So, who’s right?