… before slowly easing back for a few months, only to sprint ahead of 2023 once more in August…

… when THIS happened: an August budget deficit of a staggering $380 billion, up more than 50% from the $243 billion in July, and up more than 55% from July, and up 66% from last August… oh, and almost $100 billion more than the median estimate of $292.5 billion, which may be why the Treasury quietly snuck the number out by leaking it after 5am ET when everyone was sleeping, not at its regular time of 2pm ET.

That’s right, in a year when the monthly budget deficit was meandering along in the merry Chernobyl way, not great, not terrible, someone in the BIden admin had the brilliant idea to spend a metric asston of money to reboot the economy so we don’t get a recession just in time for the elections, and sure enough, government spending went into absolutely epic overdrive, as outlays hit a mindblowing $686 billion, the highest since March 2023, and only a handful of crisis months during the covid crash saw greater government spending in any given month.

For those wondering how government receipts have performed during this period of exploding spending, here is the answer:

… which is remarkable because while spending is absolutely exploding, revenues have also managed to bounce back, largely thanks to capital gains taxes on the surging stock market.

Yet looking at the dire big picture, it is unfortunately all downhill from here for one simple reason: we have now crossed the Minsky Moment in terms of how much the US spends on interest on its debt, which as regular readers know is hitting a new record high every day – it just closed above $35.3 trillion – and is growing by about $1 trillion every 100 days. That means that with interest rates at 40 year highs, the prediction we made last July, has finally come true because according to today’s Budget statement, the amount spent on gross interest in August was $92.3 billion…

… which means that the cumulative total for Fiscal 2024 – where there is one more month to go until the end of the fiscal year (which ends Sept 30) – just hit an all time high of $1.049 trillion, the first time in history when interest on US debt has surpassed $1 trillion.

And what’s worse, this number is not even annualized (as explained, it’s just for 11 months of the year): annualized, US debt comes out to $1.158 trillion, or $1.2 trillion rounded up as the Treasury Department itself admits…

… and the stunning punchline is that as of today, gross interest on US debt has surpassed not just Defense spending, but also Income Security, Health, Veterans Benefits and Medicare, and is now the second biggest outlay of the US government, second only to Social Security, which is roughly $1.5 trillion annualized.

But wait, there’s more: the latest numbers confirm that we are well on our way to hitting our other forecast from April 1, of the US hitting an insane $1.6 trillion in interest expense by the year-end…

Why oh why are yields surging? Oh yes…

US Interest To Hit $1.6 Trillion By Year End, Making It The Largest US Government Outlayhttps://t.co/pGdjRlhuPX

— zerohedge (@zerohedge) April 1, 2024

If the current administration remains in power, the Treasury’s own estimates predict an additional $16 trillion increase in debt by 2034, without accounting for any recession or slowdown in tax receipts. According to the Congressional Budget Office, Vice President Kamala Harris’ economic plan would add another $1.9 trillion to $2.2 trillion to the national debt.

The Harris campaign has not even bothered to discuss a plan to balance the budget. She just said that “efficiency” and the old fallacy of higher taxes on the rich would pay for the increase in spending—two things that have proven to do nothing to the ballooning debt and that do not even start to scratch the already unsustainable $2 trillion annual deficit.

This reckless increase in debt is happening in an economic growth period. However, if we adjust for government debt accumulation, 2021 to 2024 were the worst years of growth, adjusted for debt, since the 1930s.

In a recent article, economist Claudia Sahm stated that we shouldn’t worry about debt. “Debt is neither inherently good nor bad,” she wrote in an opinion column for Bloomberg back in January. “As such, the question is not what’s the right level of borrowing, but rather what’s the economic return on the borrowing or the societal goals it advances.”

She went on to say that “the government can easily service its debt because of its unlimited taxing authority and ability to issue more U.S. Treasury securities to repay maturing securities.”

Now you must worry. A lot.

Unproductive Borrowing ‘Inherently’ Bad

Let us start with the benign idea of “economic return on borrowing and societal goals.” The evidence from the United States indicates that the economic return is extremely low. Entitlement spending has not strengthened the economic growth path, and debt continues to rise faster than gross domestic product.

It’s true that debt is not inherently bad, but unproductive borrowing is. It’s a massive transfer of wealth from the productive sector to the bloated bureaucratic state.

Furthermore, the societal goals cannot be unlimited. The government must administer and not just add expenditures to previous expenditures, particularly when there is no realistic analysis of the success or failure of government programs.

The idea that a particular government program is beneficial is not enough to add it to the budget without reducing other expenses. Not even a benign view of government spending as Sahm’s can justify that every government expenditure item today is essential.

Furthermore, we must always understand that governments do not give money for free. They tax the productive sector and borrow, which means printing a currency that is constantly losing purchasing power. Therefore, the government is not advancing societal goals by borrowing without control. It is implementing a profoundly regressive policy that creates a dependent subclass and makes it increasingly difficult for the middle class to thrive.

Economic, Fiscal, and Inflationary Limits

It’s false that the government has “unlimited” taxing authority and the ability to issue more debt, i.e., print money.

The government has economic, fiscal, and inflationary limits: Economic, because constantly increasing taxation leads to stagnation and more debt; fiscal, because expenditures are consolidated and annualized, while tax receipts are cyclical; and inflationary, because the constant issuance of new currency, which is what happens when more debt is issued, leads to the loss of confidence in the currency and the erosion of its purchasing power.

If what Sahm states were true, the euro area and Japan would be examples of high growth and economic strength, but they are examples of stagnation, high debt, and rising social discontent.

The government does not set taxes to fund its incessant spending habits. Taxes should be set according to the economic reality of an economy. The fallacy of taxes on the rich and corporations does not even address the ballooning deficit and erodes economic growth and productive investment.

When someone tells you not to worry about record debt, you should be extremely concerned. When they say that the government has unlimited resources, they mean that you will pay by becoming poorer with more taxes, more inflation, lower growth, or all three at the same time.

When they tell you that $35 trillion of debt is peanuts compared with $142 trillion of American wealth, they are saying that the government will be pleased to absorb the wealth of the economy. You will pay.

Private Sector Isn’t an ATM

When they tell you that tax cuts are the problem, it comes from the perspective that the private sector is an ATM at the disposal of governments.

Tax cuts do not reduce revenues, just as tax hikes do not raise them forever. Tax cuts adjust the taxable base to the real economy in order to encourage more investment and growth.

Tax cuts are not a loss for the government. They are a win for the economy. It is simply a return of funds to those who have earned them. The idea that funds are better in the hands of the government than in the pockets of those who earned them is confiscatory.

It’s ludicrous to think that the government knows better than the private sector where and how to spend money. Additionally, it’s insane to believe that the government will not squander the funds and bloat the administrative costs.

Furthermore, it’s foolish to assume that corporations and the affluent will hoard unused funds. There’s no such thing as idle money. Capital markets and the private banking sector invest all of their earnings in a productive economy.

If Sahm is concerned about economic returns and social advancements, she should advocate for the private sector to retain a larger portion of the earned money, as it will allocate it to the most advantageous investments.

Inflation Is Regressive Form of Taxation

Inflation is a form of default, in which the government transfers its imbalances to those who receive their salaries in currency. This is the most regressive form of taxation, primarily affecting the poorest. When governments ignore the real demand for the money they issue, confidence in the currency disappears.

Developing countries do not issue debt in foreign currency because they are stupid, but because there is no international demand for their local currency.

Economists such as Sahm assume that the U.S. dollar will have eternal and unlimited demand, and, as such, the U.S. government can export inflation to the rest of the world through the loss of the purchasing power of the currency it issues.

However, global central banks are reducing their holdings of U.S. dollars (U.S. treasuries). International demand is declining, and the limits I mentioned before are already evident.

The U.S. is showing its economic limits, as evidenced by the significant slowdown despite a record deficit and government so-called stimulus. The U.S. is also demonstrating its fiscal limits as the government persists in raising taxes, resulting in significantly lower tax receipts than anticipated and an interest expense bill that has escalated to $3 billion daily.

Declining Purchasing Power of Dollar

Furthermore, the inflationary limit is evident due to a 20% increase in inflation over the past four years, a 30% increase in the cost of basic groceries, and persistent inflation, which is exemplified by the constant decline in the purchasing power of the U.S. dollar.

What Harris is doing as vice president and intends to continue doing if she becomes president is to continuously test the patience of the world and U.S. citizens when it comes to accepting a constantly depreciated purchasing power of the currency.

Saying that nothing will happen if debt continues to rise and deficits continue to drive government policy is, literally, like saying that an alcoholic should drink more vodka because cirrhosis has not killed him yet.

The dollar is the credit of the U.S. economy. If the U.S. government loses its credibility, domestic agents will begin to reduce their use of the dollar, while international agents will decline the currency due to its constant fiscal excess and its tendency to push the limits of global patience.

Thinking that the U.S. dollar will never lose its reserve currency status is simply reckless and ignores history.

Harris is threatening the dollar, and you should be very concerned when someone says that the government has unlimited taxation and printing resources. That means it has unlimited ways of making you poorer.

Over the past year, economist Daniel Lacalle has repeatedly warned that the United States is in the midst of a “private sector recession” and that official GDP measures are being propped up by government spending. The latest GDP numbers from the federal government strongly suggest he is right.

Today, the federal government’s Bureau of Economic Analysis released its revised estimate for GDP growth in the fourth quarter of 2023. According to the report, total GDP increased $334.5 billion (quarter over quarter) during the fourth quarter. That’s down from the third quarter’s quarter-over-quarter increase of $547.1 billion, but is nonetheless an ostensibly robust rate of growth.

Yet, if we compare GDP growth during the fourth quarter to growth in the total national debt, we find that the numbers don’t look quite so robust after all. While GDP may have grown by $334 billion during the period, the national debt grew by more than twice as much: $834 billion. In other words, for every dollar of GDP growth, the national debt grew by 2.7 dollars.

Moreover, this is the third quarter in a row during which debt growth has substantially outpaced GDP growth. During the third quarter, the federal debt grew $1.5 dollars for every dollar of GDP growth. During the first quarter, the debt grew 3.5 dollars for every dollar of GDP growth.

The fact that this has now happened three quarters in a row is notable as well. Over the past fifty years, it is rare to find debt growth exceeding GDP growth for more than two quarters in a row except during periods of economic weakness when the federal government relies on monetary expansion and federal spending to “stimulate” economic growth. For example, we find a three-quarter streak during the Great Recession and the years immediately afterward—when job growth was extremely weak. The same can also be seen in the quarters following the 2001 recession.

This isn’t shocking. If the federal government is trying to boost GDP numbers through “stimulus” it will both spend freely and expand the money supply as the central bank purchases Treasuries to avoid a surge in interest rates. (See more on how the central bank enables deficit spending.) The current reliance on federal deficit spending to keep up the appearance of GDP growth further backs up Lacalle’s theory that the United States is in the midst of both a public-sector expansion and a private-sector contraction. That is, the private sector is experiencing many recessionary trends, such as falling real wages, a decline in manufacturing, and growing bankruptcies. Meanwhile, however, government spending is booming, so sectors of the economy that are closely tied to government spending continue to expand. In aggregate, total GDP numbers thus show an increase, even as the private sector stagnates.

After all, it’s important to keep in mind that GDP measures include government spending, and will also include the consumption that results from additional government spending on welfare programs, weapons manufacturing, and more. As the federal government spends its deficit-financed dollars, the recipients of these dollars consume more, thus pushing up current GDP.

The general problem with this trend can be seen if we apply it to a private firm. Imagine, for instance, that a private firm managed to increase its production by a million dollars, but at the same time took on an additional $2.5 million in debt to buy new sports cars for its least productive employees. Even worse, this new debt is in addition to a huge existing debt load.

This sort of debt should never be confused with good debt, which is debt taken on to fund new capital goods. That could potentially increase productivity later on. Government debit never good debt, however, because it is taken on for purposes of immediate consumption—usually on social welfare benefits or on bombing faraway countries.

Unfortunately, as we find debt growth repeatedly top GDP growth, we are likely to see more of this phenomenon moving forward. The federal debt is now larger than the entire GDP of the United States, and the gap between debt and GDP in each year has now widened to more than six trillion dollars. As this trend continues, expect to see deficit spending play a larger and larger role in GDP.

The overreliance on credit cards and the accompanying increase in consumer debt are consequences of our fiat money system. Since Richard Nixon severed the last link between the dollar and gold in August of 1971, the dollar’s value has declined by 87 percent based on the government’s understated Consumer Price Index numbers. This means that even though Americans’ nominal wages have increased, their real wages have declined as their dollars buy less.

The continuing erosion of the dollar’s value makes it impossible for many Americans to accumulate meaningful savings. Those Americans who can save may actually lose money by doing so thanks to the Federal Reserve’s inflation tax that erodes the value of savings. This is why Congress has felt it necessary to provide tax incentives to encourage saving for things like retirement, education, and health care.

Congress could help protect Americans from the inflation tax by forbidding the Federal Reserve from purchasing government debt instruments such as Treasury securities. However, since this would end Congress’s ability to run up huge deficits, thus forcing it to pare back the welfare-warfare state, it is unlikely such legislation would pass.

The reliance of so many Americans on credit cards for basic necessities is one reason why many Americans are dissatisfied with the economy. The large amount of consumer debt is also a reason the Federal Reserve will not increase interest rates to anywhere near what they would be in a free market. The problem is compounded by the fact that investors and businesses have become addicted to near zero or at zero interest rates. The Fed’s relatively modest rate increases over the last couple years caused many “experts” to warn that the Fed was going to throw the economy into a recession. The Fed, though, has been able to claim recession has been avoided because the Fed kept the rates relatively low, and because government statistics are manipulated to understate the real rates of unemployment and inflation.

The Fed cannot indefinitely keep interest rates low without causing a dollar crisis. This will either be caused by, or result in, a rejection of the dollar’s world reserve currency status. At that point, interest rates will skyrocket and consumers and businesses that have been relying on debt to cope with the Fed’s dollar destruction will find the piper at their doors, demanding to be paid.

The economic crisis will be worsened by the moral crisis caused by the belief among too many Americans at all levels of society that they have a right to government-provided economic security at the expense of their fellow citizens. This will result in violence and the growth of authoritarian political movements.

The collapse of the fiat money system and the accompanying welfare-warfare state also provide an opportunity for those of us who understand the truth to build a society based around the principles of liberty. We must continue our efforts to reach a critical mass of people with the message of liberty while making plans to ensure our families can take care of themselves when the next crash occurs.

That $34 trillion, when spelled out, is the number thirty-four followed by twelve (count ’em) zeros separated by four commas. So it looks like this, a lot of digits and commas for the human brain to comprehend: $34,000,000,000,000.

These official debt figures do not even include the large unfunded liabilities inherent in the largest federal entitlement programs, Social Security and Medicare, Medicaid, and several others that comprise about two-thirds of federal spending. We can, however, accurately forecast those liabilities over the next seventy-five years—the time horizon used by the trustees of the two funds that finance the programs—because the future beneficiaries have already been born and will expect their benefits when they become eligible. Unfunded liabilities are currently estimated at $212 trillion.

The two programs, Social Security and Medicare, are structured so that future workers will be paying sufficient payroll taxes to pay future benefits as the population ages. But the trustees of the two programs project that the trust funds do not currently contain sufficient resources to fully cover these future benefits past the middle of the next decade without congressional changes.

Outstanding Debt versus Federal Budget Deficits

Where did all this debt come from? In the simplest sense, it came from too much spending. There tends to be confusion between annual federal budget deficits and the total outstanding federal debt. We’re referring here to the debt, not simply to the annual budget deficits that continue to increase the debt every time the federal government spends more than it receives in tax revenue.

This deficit spending results every year that the legislative and executive branches of our federal government can’t seem to control their spending habits, which has been the case every year since the late 1990s when the federal government last ran a small surplus. Annual federal budget deficits currently run at the $1.7 trillion level, compared to the $34 trillion debt.

Motivation to Pay Off the Federal Debt

Is there any motivation to attempt a debt payoff? Many Americans appear to have been lulled into accepting some variant of modern monetary theory, which has infected the populace like a virus, and which a small fringe group of economists believe allows a sovereign nation with its own sovereign currency to spend without limit, being able simply to issue more of its own currency to pay off any debt with impunity. Though these believers do not outright state that there is no limit to the amount of debt that sovereign countries can take on with no concern about ever repaying, reading between the lines and watching their behavior certainly indicates this conclusion.

What Debt Payoff Might Look Like

If there is any motivation to pay off the federal debt, what would this payoff actually entail? In the simplest terms, dividing the current outstanding $34 trillion debt by the current US population of 334,233,854 (as of January 1, 2023) yields a one-time per capita payoff figure of $101,725.18 for every man, woman, and child in the US.

While this undoubtedly exceeds the average savings account owned by most Americans, it doesn’t look like an outrageously high figure. But, of course, we’re assuming no more annual federal budget deficits that increase the debt, which would be a difficult promise for Congress and any president to keep. But if such a payoff were possible, it would obviate the need to continue paying interest on the debt, an outlay that now runs about $1 trillion annually.

Another approach to pay off the federal debt over time might be to structure the debt payoff similarly to an amortized mortgage. As a hypothetical thought exercise, picture that you’ve taken on a $34 trillion mortgage to buy your ultimate dream house.

The interest rate on this hypothetical mortgage is the current average rate being paid to lenders who own the Treasury bonds that comprise the debt. After all, these lenders, which include both Americans and those in foreign countries such as China, Japan, the United Kingdom, and others, would expect to receive their interest payments during the next thirty years that you will be paying your hypothetical mortgage.

The average annual interest rate on the US debt, as of December 2023, is 3.11 percent, which is expected to increase over time. But if you can lock in this interest rate on your hypothetical thirty-year $34 trillion mortgage, 3.11 percent sounds like a pretty good deal, below current conventional mortgage rates.

Using an Excel spreadsheet for the calculations, the formula for the monthly mortgage payment is PMT (1,2,3), where three arguments are as follows:

1. Monthly interest rate expressed as a decimal (0.0311), divided by 12.
2. The number of mortgage payments, 360 in this example (thirty years times 12).
3. The mortgage loan amount ($34,000,000,000,000 here).

For readers who may want to try this at home, inserting these three arguments into the Excel PMT calculation, the monthly payment for 360 payments over thirty years at a monthly mortgage interest rate of 0.00259 (i.e., 0.259 percent, about one-quarter of 1 percent) would be $145,370,309,731.07 total, or $434.94 per capita.

That’s $145 billion and change every month for thirty years, or $434.94 per every American man, woman, and child. This is most likely more than every American could ever afford to contribute every month for thirty years to repay the federal debt. And again, this assumes no more continuing federal budget deficits that would increase the existing debt. Remember, we’re only trying to pay off the current outstanding debt of $34 trillion.

Yet these figures are worth contemplating for their astounding magnitude, just as the total outstanding federal debt is worth contemplating for its astounding magnitude. These figures are very difficult for the human brain to grasp.

Anyone reading this far must conclude that this is a fatuous exercise, that there is no achievable way to pay off the current federal debt within the lifetimes of Americans currently alive, and that the only possible remedy is to begin curtailing federal spending to avoid taking on additional debt. That’s why we occasionally hear a few politicians speaking of (or paying lip service to) “deficit reduction,” which in the current political environment is the only humanly possible pursuit. And accomplishing that is easier said than done, for political as much as for financial reasons.

And on a final note, when contemplating the US fiscal predicament, keep in mind that there are only four means by which government can capture resources for its own use:

1. Outright confiscation of property for public use, which is prevented by the US Constitution’s “taking clause” without just compensation of the property owner.
2. Taxation.
3. Debt issuance.
4. Inflation that erodes the nominal amount of the debt over time, harming lenders.

Some observers would argue that this fourth strategy is perhaps what we are beginning to observe in the US and some other countries around the world, but that is a topic for another day.

About the Author

Jane Johnson is a retired college economics instructor who currently teaches economics at the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute in southern California. She is a graduate of Vassar College, and has graduate degrees from UC-Berkeley, and the University of Washington.

“Years ago there was a rather idiotic battle between financial analysts over what the end result of the Fed’s massive stimulus measures would be. One side argued that deflation would be the outcome and that no amount of Fed printing would overtake the vast black hole of debt conjured by the derivatives implosion. The other side argued that the Fed would continue to print perpetually, resorting to QE4 or possibly “QE infinity” and negative interest rates as a means to stave off a market crash for decades (like Japan) while at the same time initiating a Weimar-style inflationary bonanza.

Both sides were wrong because they refused to acknowledge the third option – stagflation.”

The process of stagflation is difficult to track because there are multiple paths that it can take, many of them largely dependent on the whims of the central bank and its policy decisions. All we can really do is look back at the limited number of historic  examples and guess at what will happen next. In the 1970s, stagflation nearly crushed the country with inflation rising by 7% to over 14% per year for a decade while the general public eventually faced high unemployment.

When I hear Zennials complain about being born into the “worst economy ever,” I have to laugh because they really have no clue. The 1970s was FAR worse in terms of erosion of buying power as well as overall poverty. If you look at film footage and photos of urban areas from LA to NY to Philadelphia during that time, many parts of these cities looked like bombed out war zones. The country was truly on the edge of disaster.

In the early 1980s, the Federal Reserve jacked interest rates up to over 20% – This stopped the inflation crisis but triggered a deflationary plunge that would sit like a giant boulder on the chest of the American consumer and small business owners for years to come. My own grandfather lost millions in his trucking and freight company during the rate spike; many people lost their businesses and homes.

In other words, as bad as the situation is now, we haven’t seen anything yet. Of course, we are quickly moving towards similar conditions and there is one thing we have today that the 1970s didn’t: A massive snowballing national debt.

Currently, the US national debt is $33.8 trillion and has a 120% debt-to-GDP ratio. In a single month (October) the US added over $600 billion to the debt, and at the current pace the total official debt will hit over $41 trillion in one year. The speed of this accumulation is frightening. To put this in perspective, the Obama Administration and the Federal Reserve added around $9 trillion to the debt in 8 years during the corporate bailouts. Under Joe Biden, this is set to happen in a little over 1 year.

How is this happening?

As I have noted in the past, the US economy has stacked so much fiat and so much debt that any deviation in interest rates is going cause huge ripple effects. We don’t even need to hit the 20% interest rates of the early 1980s – A constant rate of near 6% is enough to cause debt to skyrocket. Then there is the problem of “compounding interest.” The US government is borrowing money to make interest payments, but it also borrows to roll over the principal payments, and it borrows still more to fund the general spending which is in excess of taxes collected (deficit spending).

At higher interest-rate levels, borrowing enters a destructive spiral. There’s interest payments on debt, which was itself borrowed to make interest payments on debt. To put it in simple terms, it’s a bit like a broke person taking on a stack of new credit cards to make the interest payments on a stack of old credit cards. It’s financial suicide.

Eventually the avalanche of debt will stall inflation but it will also pop multiple asset bubbles cross numerous market sectors and trigger a deflationary crisis. We are already seeing this trend with a crash in manufacturing as well as frozen wages. We are seeing it in the freight industry, with layoffs and bankruptcies piling up in a shocking downturn indicating impending recession. Not to mention US home sales have plunged to a 13 year low as prices continue to rise.

These are all red flags of an impending deflation event that WILL lead to large scale job losses, likely within the next year. It would seem the magic of covid stimulus measures is finally fading away and we are beginning to see the real economy underneath.

All the negative news has led to a spike in stock markets recently. Why? Because bad news is good news for equities. The expectation among investors is that the Fed is poised to cut rates or return swiftly to QE. This is not going to happen, at least not anytime soon. The Fed, I believe, wants a crash. After addicting markets to easy money for over a decade, the central bankers know EXACTLY what will happen as they continue to cut off the drug supply.

I suspect we are about to see a major change in the behavior of the economy going into 2024. The stagflation phase is nearly over. The discussion around dinner tables across America will turn to the exploding national debt, and debt in general. The big debate will once again turn to this: Will the Fed keep rates steady, risking deflationary implosion and debt default, or, will they cut rates, return to stimulus to pay the debt and risk double digit inflation?

These are the two choices in front of us as debt overwhelms the system.

At this moment, our national debt is sitting at $33,836,693,993,860.35. It is probably going to hit 34 trillion dollars by the end of the year.

To put this into perspective, when Barack Obama first entered the White House we were about 10 trillion dollars in debt.

We are literally committing national suicide, but for a long time most Americans didn’t really care because we were not experiencing any serious consequences. But now the party is ending.

Thanks to rapidly rising interest rates, U.S. Treasury bonds “are in a bear market worse than the dot-com bust and almost as bad as 2008”…

Elementary economic forces — too much supply and not enough demand — have collided to create the worst stretch for U.S. government bonds since the Civil War. The government keeps borrowing to cover its budget deficits, while once-reliable buyers of that debt, both at home and abroad, have pulled back.

The result: Investors are demanding the steepest yields since 2007. Auctions of fresh bonds that were once routine are now going terribly. And bond portfolios are getting absolutely hammered. The longest-dated Treasury bonds are in a bear market worse than the dot-com bust and almost as bad as 2008.

A bond crash normally precedes a stock market crash.

That is exactly what happened in 2008, and it appears that the same pattern is being reproduced now.

So if you have a lot of money in the stock market, you may want to brace yourself for what is ahead.

In the past, we could always rely on China, Japan and other foreign buyers to keep the party going, but now they are not very interested in our bonds…

China and Japan, once reliable buyers of Treasury bonds, have been selling them to prop up their weakening currencies. A decade ago they held more than 22% of U.S. government bonds; today it’s 7%.

The Ukraine war has dampened demand among Eastern European buyers, said Steve Ricchiuto, the chief U.S. economist at Mizuho. Increasing U.S. oil production means fewer petrodollars in the Middle East to be reinvested through the Treasury market.

U.S. banks, too, are stepping back.

I certainly can’t blame our banks for “stepping back” from buying more bonds.

Thanks to the dramatic shift in interest rates that we have witnessed, they are sitting on hundreds of billions of dollars in unrealized losses.

So who is going to buy our debt in 2024 and beyond? That is a very good question. And servicing the debt that we have already accumulated is becoming a major problem.

During the last year, the federal government “had to spend one-fifth of all the money it collected just on debt interest”…

The U.S. federal government has borrowed so much money that, over the past year, it has had to spend one-fifth of all the money it collected just on debt interest—which came to almost $880 billion.

Americans paid some $450 billion less in income taxes for the year, trapping the government in the pincers of a fiscal crunch.

The country teeters on the brink of a debt spiral that could devolve into a fiscal crisis or hyperinflation, several economists told The Epoch Times.

“The problem is serious because, any way you cut it, taxpayers are paying interest on the mountain of debt that has been accumulated,” said Steve Hanke, a professor of applied economics at Johns Hopkins University. “In short, they are paying something for nothing.”

In 2024, the U.S. government will spend well over a trillion dollars just in interest on the national debt.

That wasn’t supposed to happen until 2030.

A day of reckoning has arrived, and it is just a matter of time before the entire system comes crashing down like a house of cards.

This isn’t going to be just another “financial crisis”.  As James Rickards has aptly noted, what we will soon experience will be “qualitatively different” from anything that we have ever experienced before…

The next financial crisis will not be merely a bigger version of the 1998 and 2008 crises, it will be qualitatively different. It will encompass multiple asset classes on a global scale. It will exhibit inflation not seen since the 1970s, insolvency not seen since the 1930s and exchange shutdowns not seen since 1914. State power will be summoned to contain panic.

What Rickards is describing is a full-blown economic collapse.

So what will our society look like once such a scenario unfolds?

Already, economic conditions have deteriorated so dramatically that demand at local food banks has risen to “unprecedented” levels in some cities…

The demand for local food banks is on the rise as soaring prices impact average Americans under President Joe Biden.

The increasing demand for food banks demonstrates how soaring inflation driven by “Bidenomics” negatively impacts lower income families.

“We are seeing unprecedented demand,” Jackie DeCarlo, chief executive of Manna Food Center, told the Washington Post on Monday.

If things are this bad now, what will we be facing a year or two from now? At this point, there is no escape.

All our politicians can do is to keep the party going for as long as they possibly can. They knew that they were destroying our financial future, and they also knew that they couldn’t keep borrowing and spending insane amounts of money forever. Of course nobody can say that we weren’t warned.

People like me have been relentlessly warning about our financial condition for years, and now I am warning about what is coming in the aftermath of the approaching financial meltdown.

Our leaders tried to outrun the basic laws of economics for a long time, and for a while they were flying high. But now reality has caught up with them, and we are all going to pay a very bitter price for their crimes.

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That is if the entire global debt-based fiat currency system even lasts that long. The ruling classes of the globe have big plans to ensure they control every aspect of every human being’s existence on this planet.

The US exceeded its debt ceiling, which was legally set at $31.4 trillion, in January 2023. After months of warnings of an imminent and economically disastrous default from the US Treasury, President Joe Biden in June signed a bipartisan debt bill that allowed the limit to be lifted until January 2025. This effectively allowed the government to keep borrowing without limits through next year. Debt spiked to $32 trillion less than two weeks after the bill was approved and has been piling up ever since. –RT

According to the forecast, the current outstanding public debt amounts to roughly $33.6 trillion, but at the pace it is growing and due to “fiscal excess in the 2020s,” it is likely to grow by $5.2 billion daily for the next 10 years, which would put it at around $54 trillion by 2033, according to a report by RT. 

“US public debt is… more than the combined GDPs of China, Japan, Germany, and India,” Bank of America investment strategist Michael Hartnett noted in the forecast. He warned, however, that Washington was unlikely to stop taking loans even if the federal deficit is contained because borrowing is seen as a means to fuel economic growth and help drive the circulation of money. “Likely central banks may simply bail out governments in coming years via quantitative easing and the introduction of yield curve control,” Hartnett added.

That means we should expect the cost of living to rise as inflation continues to beat down the slave class and the rulers devalue the already worthless fiat currency even further.

It is not for the sake of fearmongering that we took on a Christian precious metals sponsor. It was because we have legitimate concerns about the economy, both today and more importantly into the future, that we vetted out 31 companies and decided on partnering with Genesis Gold Group. With that said, here’s the article explaining the current state of affairs by Discern Reporter…

Investor demand for safe-haven assets amid market volatility and geopolitical instability in the Middle East has led to an increase in both gold and the U.S. dollar. The December Gold Futures are currently consolidating recent gains near the significant $2000 mark.

Concerns over escalating war fears, government dysfunction, and rising bond yields have caused the S&P 500 to lose key support at 4200 mid-week, setting the stage for a potentially turbulent Fed-week.

The rising bond yields have further fueled interest in gold as traders and investors grow worried about U.S. fiscal policy and the potential impact of increasing yields on the economy.

Investors are particularly concerned about the growing amount of U.S. debt, which now stands at over $33.6 trillion and continues to rise rapidly. The surge in bond yields has also resulted in a rise in mortgage rates, putting pressure on home buyers looking to remortgage.

While the Federal Reserve is likely to maintain its current inflation-fighting approach during its upcoming meeting, the cost of borrowing for home buyers has increased. This cautious approach from businesses and banks, coupled with higher borrowing costs and gasoline prices, has put restraints on economic growth.

Despite better-than-expected economic indicators such as home sales, advanced Q3 GDP reading, durable goods, and weekly jobless claims, there are concerns about the sustainability of consumer spending due to stagnant incomes. Businesses are also approaching the market cautiously due to higher borrowing costs, and banks are becoming more reluctant to lend.

The current quarter’s performance is crucial, as there are already signs of a potential slowdown, including cautious corporate commentary and a decline in bank lending.

The Leading Economic Indicator (LEI) is also showing signs of concern, with its current decline and narrowing interest rate spreads suggesting that a recession may be approaching.

As the price of gold approaches an expected breakout to all-time highs above $2100, there has been increased interest from long-term investors and Western institutions in gold-backed exchange-traded products. The Gold/S&P ratio has also been rising, indicating that gold is outperforming the stock market, particularly amid intensifying Middle East conflicts.

Given the current state of the U.S. economy, including a growing national debt, a dysfunctional government, ongoing wars, and credit rating agencies scrutinizing major banks, Western investors may consider diversifying their investments by allocating some profits from the stock market to gold.

The expectation is that mining companies will outperform the stock market once the GOLD/S&P500 ratio establishes support at the 0.50 level and gold surpasses the $2100 mark. Junior mining companies are also expected to outperform both the stock market and larger mining companies.

In anticipation of these potential gains, the Junior Miner Junky (JMJ) newsletter has compiled a selection of quality junior mining companies with significant upside potential into 2025-26.

Our debt spiral has reached a terminal phase, and all we can do now is prolong the agony.  If we keep taking on more debt at an exponential rate, we may be able to extend our seemingly endless party for a little while longer.  As for the bright future that our children and grandchildren were supposed to have, we destroyed that a long time ago, and so it doesn’t really matter what we do now.

What our politicians are doing to us is truly a crime against humanity.

And I am not just talking about the United States.  All over the world, politicians have been on the greatest debt binge in the history of the human race, and for quite a few years it seemed like they were getting away with it.

But now interest rates are rising and there is great turmoil in the bond markets.  The following comes from CNN…

A slump in government bonds around the world has pushed up the cost of some nations’ debt to levels not seen in more than a decade. That’s bad news for governments in the red but also for the wallets of millions of mortgage borrowers, stock investors and businesses.

The sell-off has been fueled by expectations among investors that the world’s major central banks will keep interest rates “higher for longer” to bring inflation down to their targets.

It works like this: Governments looking to raise cash for public services and investments issue bonds. A bond provides a way to borrow money from investors for a set length of time, with the obligation to make regular interest payments.

In recent weeks, bond yields have reached very alarming levels.

If this continues, governments all over the world will soon be facing enormous problems…

When official interest rates rise, so do investors’ expectations for returns on bonds, known as yields. This creates an incentive for investors to sell the bonds they currently hold and buy newly issued ones that offer higher interest payments. Selling bonds reduces prices. So, in short, when yields rise, bond prices fall.

And yields have most definitely been rising: The yield on 30-year US government bonds, also known as Treasuries, hit 5% on Tuesday for the first time since 2007. In the United Kingdom, the yield on 30-year bonds also reached 5% this week, the highest level in more than two decades.

Yields on German long-dated bonds are back to levels last seen on the eve of the eurozone debt crisis in 2011. Yields on Italy’s 10-year bonds hit 5% on Wednesday, the highest level since 2012, when that crisis was in full swing.

There is no way out of this mess now.

If we would have acted responsibly all along, we would have gotten a much different outcome.

But at this point our fate is pretty much sealed.

Of course our politicians never intended to change course.  In fact, they continue to spend money like drunken sailors.

As Zero Hedge has aptly noted, the U.S. government recently added 275 billion dollars to the national debt in a single day…

The US added – checks notes – $275 billion in debt in, uh, ONE DAY

Total US debt is now $33.442 trillion, hit $33 trillion just 2 weeks ago, and on pace to rise by $1 trillion in 1 month.

What makes all of this even more frustrating is that they aren’t even spending the money efficiently.  And in many instances, it is being wasted on extremely frivolous things…

Federal officials have been criticized after splashing $3.3 billion on swanky new office furniture during the pandemic, when almost all staff worked from home.

The egregious spending habits of the US government included almost $250,000 on solar-powered picnic tables for the CDC, and $120,000 on plush Ethan Allen leather chairs.

We are borrowing and spending money at an exponential pace, and we all know how this is going to end.

It is going to end with the U.S. dollar becoming worth little more than toilet paper.

This is a point that author Robert Kiyosaki made very eloquently during a recent interview…

Robert Kiyosaki, renowned author of the phenomenal personal finance book “Rich Dad, Poor Dad,” shared a piece of his mind on how to decentralize from the fiat currency in these scary times of a broken banking system. According to him, the dollar has been losing its purchasing power and not long from now, it would just be worth less than “toilet paper.”

During his appearance on the recent episode “Decentralize.TV” hosted by Mike Adams and Todd Pitner, Kiyosaki pointed out how the lack of financial education in the United States blinds the people and even President Joe Biden’s administration in tackling the current economic downturn. “Just recently they raised the debt ceiling again… and because our schools have no financial education, no idea of credit rating, our debt increased by $1.8 trillion. The United States via Fitch Rating services downgraded the U.S. debt from AAA to AA-plus. We are on a collision course for disaster.”

It is true.

We really are on a “collision course” with disaster, but most Americans don’t realize what is happening.

Most Americans seem to believe that there will never be any serious consequences for all the borrowing and spending that we have been doing. And that is because most Americans don’t understand basic economics.

When your debt rises much faster than your income does for an extended period of time, it is always going to result in pain. Every single time.

If you have ever found yourself drowning in debt, you know exactly what I am talking about. Well, now our entire country is drowning in debt, and our politicians are adding hundreds of billions more to that debt every single month.

This is not going to end well, and that should be obvious to everyone.

For the moment, our politicians are doing their best to keep the debt spiral humming, but the clock is ticking and time is quickly running out…

Michael’s new book entitled “End Times” is now available in paperback and for the Kindle on Amazon.com, and you can check out his new Substack newsletter right here.