“If Something Cannot Go on Forever, It Will Stop“

On a debt load that’s already at $34 trillion. When I wrote my first post on this topic in 2019 it was $22 trillion, and it’s also growing as a proportion of the US economy. In that first post I also looked at the “missing debt” in the picture: the unfunded liabilities of programs like Social Security and Medicaid which amount to several times more than today’s Federal debt, even if spread across two or three decades.

“Little wonder ‘debt debasement’ trades closing in on all-time highs, i.e. gold $2077/oz, bitcoin $67734,” [Bank of America investment strategist Michael Hartnett] wrote in a note Thursday.

Spot gold is currently hovering around $2,084 an ounce, while bitcoin was recently around $61,443. The cryptocurrency in February closed out its best month since 2020, briefly trading above $64,000 on Wednesday before pulling back. Inflows into crypto funds are on course for a “blowout year,” with an annualized inflow of $44.7 billion so far this year, Hartnett noted.

Japan is a modern, industrialised civil society that has been carrying a debt load of some 200% for two decades now and has not collapsed, at least not in a catastrophic way, although their economy has merely crept along since the 1990’s – so perhaps there’s a ways to go on US debt.